The Quiet Fintech Behind $85 Billion in Transactions, with Payoneer CEO John Caplan

[MUSIC] Hi, this is Lex, and welcome to the Fintech Blueprint. It's your podcast about Fintech, decentralized finance, digital banking, investing, robot advice, artificial intelligence, and all the other frontier technology that is transforming financial services. To get more content like an illustrated transcript of this conversation in your inbox, subscribe at FintechBlueprint.com. So without further delay, let's jump into today's episode. Hi, everybody, and welcome to today's conversation. We are absolutely fortunate to have with us today, John Kaplan, who is the CEO of Payneer. Payneer is a public company and is one of the original innovators in cross-border payments. And I think a fantastic example to a lot of companies that are being built today. So I'm really interested to learn more about Payneer and to learn from John's career trajectory. Welcome to the conversation. Thank you for having me. So, going to geek out upfront, my very first touch point with Payneer was, I think, in 2012, I was at Columbia doing too many graduate degrees, and I was interning for Matt Harris at Payne Capital at the time. And he was looking at venture investment in Payneer as the example of cross-border Fintech innovation. And so for me, it's kind of a real treat to understand how the company has been built. John, maybe we can start with your career and how you got your entry point into technology and into Fintech. I am an insatiable entrepreneur and I had the good fortune to meet Scott Gallett, who was the former CEO at Payneer while I was running alibaba.com's cross-border business. And Scott and I got to know each other became friends. And when he was thinking about succession planning, he invited me into the company. And it has been three and a half years of intense entrepreneurship, growth, creativity, in a dynamic environment. We're proud of the results and excited about the future. Looking back on my career, I've worked from beverage companies like Arizona IST, Starbucks, retail firms, about.com founded a business called Open Sky, which we sold alibaba group. My curiosity is what's driven my professional development and sort of the sensational desire to learn more and then make a positive impact on people's lives in the process of building platforms, technology-driven platforms. Can we go to alibaba and that experience? Because you were there before the acquisition and after kind of at a time that was pretty incredible for the company, for the story of Chinese technology. What was Open Sky and why did alibaba engage with you? Yeah, we built Open Sky to support small business entrepreneurs who were selling on global marketplaces who needed help with sales, marketing and distribution. And we scaled the business really successfully, got to $50 million of revenue. And I think the alibaba team at year 12, 14, 15 of alibaba groups, development, were looking to bring into the firm sleeves rolled up global entrepreneurs as alibaba group ambition was to be a more global technology firm to really compete with the Amazon and Google's of the world. They acquired Open Sky and then acquired Open Sky and Daniel Zhang, who was CEO at the time, said to me, when he bought Open Sky, you're the kind of entrepreneur we had at alibaba when we started and we want you to come in and shake the tree. Little did he know that joining alibaba group for me was an extraordinary education in resilience, commitment, customer centricity, learning about how that organization was creating value for small business owners around the world, really taught me a great deal about listening to the needs of customers, understanding how global entrepreneurship is having grown up in New York City and from a family of entrepreneurs. It was an extraordinary journey in a country of 1.0 plus billion people, the 250,000 folks who worked at alibaba group were the smartest best of the best and to learning, participate with them was extraordinary. From a financial technology perspective, I had some good exposure to ant financial and alipay and the innovation there and learned about the notion of a super app, what the value props could be and always wondered why that wasn't being deployed globally. Obviously there's geopolitical reasons, regulatory reasons. When Scott invited me to join PANeer, I saw the potential for a global, regulated, trusted solution for the world's cross-border SMBs that out of the PANeer assets we could build and in the three and a half years I've been here we have made a real progress towards being a financial operating partner to the most dynamic entrepreneurs on the planet. Let's unpack this a bit because of course there's so much there. Going back to OpenSky, he mentioned the small business and the global nature of small business and certainly how alibaba was the engine of alibaba was this entrepreneurial spirit and transformation the China was going through. There's also obviously a transition between commerce, payments, financing and all of these companies are playing in that space. Can we start at the micro level of OpenSky, what kind of business or persona were you building? What were they trading and what is it that they needed? What I found really interesting was the Western entrepreneurs who were sourcing products around the world and selling them on marketplaces had two challenges. One was identifying high quality goods that they could brand in manufacture, which were largely being produced in China and then getting distribution on eBay or Amazon or Walmart or Etsy or any of living social group on the platform and how important it was that they matched price, their promotion, their advertising, their return on ad spend, their supply chain delivery to create scale. I thought we could do is aggregate brands, provide them a solution that would improve their yield on their online marketing while improving the margins on how they sourced their products. By doing both, the traders would have more margin to reinvest in their growth. That worked pretty well and got us some nice scale. That was essentially what OpenSky was all about. I think what all I bought was saw and the team and our approach was I think similar to what the trading partners do for US brands or Western brands that sell on team all or Tau Bao. There's a whole economy of companies inside of China that helps global brands sell on the Chinese marketplaces. And in many ways, we had built a mirror image of that in the West for US brands. I think that pattern recognition was appealing to the Oliveaba group team. What did the supply chain look like and what were the financial products across that supply chain that either you were facilitating or saw developing? I think the most important was this notion of helping people with working capital. And the Western buyers sourcing products and their inconsistent cash flow and the needs for placing orders, sourcing high quality goods, paying for them 30% down when you pay 70% when it gets on the boat well before you ever monetize the merchandise. And on the other side, in Asia, the manufacturers had similar challenges sourcing raw materials, getting the quality, managing for returns. And so if you think about the three global supply chains, they are data, money, and physical goods. And the supply chain of money connected to the supply chain of goods for small businesses is remarkably complex. And I think I was bitten by the FinTech bug in my open sky tenure. Then at Oliveaba at Oliveaba.com saw just how powerful providing capital solutions were for SMBs. And now at Pioneer, we're working capital is not a large part of our business at all today, but perfecting a solution for multi-entity global businesses that are where the majority of their revenue comes outside of their home country is really animating me, my team, and what we're building here for those entrepreneurs. So Ed open sky, how quickly did you get a feeling of traction? Context for the question is, you know, a lot of FinTechs spend years in power point and raising venture capital and talking about the future, whereas, you know, I would expect working with real businesses who need financing yesterday for customers that they have is sort of a bit more immediate. Open sky wasn't a FinTech right? Open sky was a marketing and distribution solution and technology. platform, we failed twice and succeeded once over seven years. And so the like all entrepreneurs, the building of the business required both luck, product market fit and really great team of people. When we got to our third incarnation, which was our most successful, what was clear is that if you match the needs of global SMBs who were sourcing from China with the needs of the manufacturers and actually aligned goals, you could find both margin and value across the supply chain that led to growth for us, ultimately in that lead to the sale to all of Bobbi group. - When you were in the Allie Bobbosied, I guess the question that comes to mind for me is just thinking about the e-commerce industry. I think around that time, those a conversation about how in the US e-commerce is something like while Amazon of course was enormous and is enormous, something like 10% of all retail, where in China it was 60% of all retail. Did you see that fault line sort of what were your observations? Did you have any surprise? - You know, if you think about the power of the US retail ecosystem, it's really built based on the cities where people live, the distribution systems, the retail experience and big box stores, malls, branded retailers in China that it didn't quite, the infrastructure didn't exist the same way. So the E-Com distribution and mobile meant that everyone, in the tier one or two or three cities, would be able to have access to the Nike sneakers that they wanted without Nike ever having to either physically distribute them to retail stores or open their own. And so it felt like the pace of digital distribution was so extraordinarily fast that the, and the rising middle class in China was excited about getting access to the world's brands that there was the best of both worlds for the innovation of retail. And that was what built, you know, T-Mobile, Tau Bao, you know, all the best Chinese e-commerce companies. Yeah, so I think that really was what the power was there. I think in the US today, you can see how E-Com continues to be really dynamic and powerful, but retailers, physical retailers are continuing to try to create experiences that make shopping in a physical store fun, dynamic, interesting. I think it'll be instructive to see for Q4 2025, a couple of years out from the pandemic, just the continued solid, you know, high single digit growth of E-Com as it can eat into the physical retail experience here in the US. I'd love to go one level deeper on this, because, you know, I think at like the system architecture level, there's sort of a, there's a very intuitive story about, while here in the US you had the incumbents and you have consumers that have a certain behavioral set of preferences and in China, that wasn't there and so sort of like a blue ocean. But when you go down to the micro level of, you know, how does somebody even design a distribution network at the scale that Ali Baba did, right? Like, how do you warehouse, how do you create the network of companies that deliver the goods, you know, locally to the long tail of where people live? Do you have any examples they could bring that tension to life? I don't think that's gonna happen here in the US, the way it happened across Asia, right, with, because I think the, both the regulatory environment in the US across the supply chain, the city, state, federal rules, I think make difficult. I was reading something just this morning that there's an effort in New York City to ban Amazon trucks from delivering and they want Amazon goods in New York City to be delivered on bicycle. I think that'd be wonderful for the environment and probably fantastic for traffic, but likely not great for the mass distribution of products to everybody's apartment buildings around New York. - Yeah, you just have to put robots on a bike and then it's fine. - Yeah, exactly. So what I actually think about supply chains is they are, the ambitions are universal, but the executions local and what worked in, in Shanghai is gonna be totally different than what's gonna work in, in Mexico City and it's gonna be completely different that it'll work in Chicago. And part of that, I think, is the lesson of globalizing big companies is you have to have a universal value prop that you can localize effectively. And certainly a pain here, we see that in our products, right, we have two million active customers. Some of them are small freelancers in Bangladesh and others are billion dollar firms in Europe. They use different products of ours, but all of it's on a common sort of central infrastructure platform that we've built and designed. And I think much is the same in the distribution of physical goods, it's certainly true in the distribution of financial services. - How much does it hurt to have legacy infrastructure and incumbents and these embedded prior behaviors in place? Because this often comes up in stories about like, "Emphasa in Africa" or in the, the manufacturing build out in Asia or the e-commerce story that you just touched on, is it really that big of a deal or do you find that people can adopt new behaviors if it's worth it to them? Like, how do you get people to digitize? - Yeah, so I think that's the essence of, certainly the last couple of decades of the entrepreneurial economy is, if you actually make someone's life better, they'll change their behavior, right? And we've seen that with what the big e-commerce players have done in the US, we've seen that with what the peer-to-peer remittance companies have done, if you compare what firms like, remittly is done compared to what MoneyGram has done. And you certainly see it in what we're doing a pain year with our solutions for the multi-entity global entrepreneurs. They view us as a better alternative than what local banks or analog banks or traditional banks can offer that's cheaper and faster and more trusted. And so they choose us over the alternative. I think it's remarkably simple. You gotta create more value than you take. And when you do that, people will adopt the solutions that you offer, that would be my view. It's a little bit like the Netflix guy's talking about buying Warner Discovery these days and saying, "You know what, I think people maybe like watching movies on their couch more than they like watching them in a movie theater and therefore, the distribution model has changed." Yes, that's not only true in my family. - That's a great transition to pain year. Could you give us a sense of the company's scale today in terms of volumes and revenues, and then maybe how long the company has been in business as well? - We just celebrated our 20 year anniversary and the third CEO, the firm has had, and we are over a billion dollars in revenue, well north of $200 million of adjusted EBITDA, $85 billion of volumes. We are two million active customers. We've had 16 and a half percent compound annual growth for the 11 quarters I've been CEO of the firm. And we've taken our business, that the core business which had been unprofitable when I arrived and we will deliver north of $30 million of core EBITDA this year, we hold about seven and a half billion dollars of customer funds in balances. That's up 17% year over year. Our largest customers are, you know, the customers that do over a million dollars in annual volume are delivering the vast majority of our B2B growth as we've evolved the firm from being a marketplace payouts company to being a farm bank alternative for cross-border businesses. So, you know, our business is healthy, growing, profitable, nearly $200 million of free cash flow. This is a strong, solid, growing, exciting company these days. - The company went public through a SPAC merger in 21 at the boom of SPAC transactions and also sort of the boom of post-COVID traction inflation across the industry, but what you described $85 billion of volume, I mean, that's a very significant company and, you know, it looks like you've more than doubled revenues or effectively so since going public. - You know, one of the things I think that's really important and I think overlooked is the pay near solution really solves the most challenging part of global entrepreneurship, which is not, yeah, on the financial services side. The CEO or CFO or entrepreneur who's building a business process outsourcer and marketing services form a grain distribution company from Ukraine, those entrepreneurs really power the global economy. They are, you know, in countries where the GDP is driven, over 50% of the GDP is driven by SMB exports, our business is exceptionally strong and getting stronger. And I think the next decade of entrepreneurship, not just AI and not just stablecoin, but it's actually globalization. It's this notion that innovation can happen anywhere. It's not just Silicon Valley, it's not just London, it's not just stable coins or as traded assets. It's actually a time where the world's entrepreneurs can sleep anywhere and serve everyone and pay an ears design to be the business partner to those firms. I definitely want to unpack both the product and sort of the comparison to other cross-border businesses and kind of talk about the future of money movement. But before going there, can you give us a flavor of what Paynear looked like before you arrived and during its founding? What was the original customer segment that it was going after? What was its DNA and how did the firm think about that opportunity in the early days? Yeah, so Paynear started as a prepaid card solution for people who were traveling. The firm as marketplace distribution evolved, Paynear solved a very specific problem, which was the world's western marketplaces wanted access to global supply. But the financial system wasn't designed to make it easy for those entrepreneurs to get local bank accounts in the west. Paynear solved the, would do the KYC and money movement solution for global entrepreneurs who were selling on western marketplaces. So the source of funds was well known. If you do effective KYC and build a global network of licenses and banks, the firm very effectively aggregated billions and tens of billions of dollars of volume with the world's most meaningful marketplaces. When I arrived, observing the sort of assembled assets, what was clear talking to our customers was that not only did they sell on marketplaces, they sold wholesale or they sold direct to consumer for the goods firms. And meeting with services firms around the world, they also had complex financial services needs that their local bank in Pakistan or in Vietnam or in Columbia or Bolivia, Peru were unable to solve. But they had as dynamic as businesses in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. And we moved the firm very aggressively from an AR first company to being an AR and AP company. Our cards business is now 12% of our total usage is spent on paying your cards distributed around the world. We developed intra network payments. So two paying your customers around the globe could move money to one another. Instantly, we extended our pay with paying your solutions so that our customers could source raw materials or packing boxes or pay vendors directly out of their pay and your account. And as we expanded the set of solutions, we were offering to entrepreneurs. We saw a really interesting dynamic. They would bring more of their AR volume into their pay and your account. It wasn't a pass through account. You know, Lex, I used to think of it as sort of a toll booth on the money highway. We moved the business into being the primary operating account for the international activities of the entrepreneurs who use our capabilities. In doing so, we moved the firm up market. When I arrived, 20% of our customers were what I would think of as small SMB. Now it's a third of our customers are our largest cohort of customer, our largest customers, the logo, volume, and net revenue retention is some of the best I've seen at any company I've worked at. We are very focused on moving paying your up market because there's a gap in the solutions. The multinational banks don't have the service or technology or tools. The small local banks have none of the technology or capability. But the entrepreneurs who we work with are they do business in dozens of countries and they used to have to have dozens of banking relationships. And they're turning to pay near as their primary international account and using their local domestic account for all the domestic needs they have. And that's what I think unlocked this second curve of growth that the firm has experienced over the last couple of years and one that we are just hell bent on continuing to deliver for our global customers. That's fantastic to see. I want to ask what's probably an irritating competitive question, but also as a way to understand a little bit better how the product works. I think a lot of people who've seen cross-border payments companies, there's always a diagram of swift and the inefficiencies of going through multiple hops between different geographies. Then there's a network map that clears the payments through a single entity. Whether that's transroized in the middle for retail users and I think these days air wallets is trying to tell that story as well. Mercury is telling that story to some extent. Pay near was there I think earlier than a lot of these other companies. Can you talk about the architecture of the product itself, how you accomplish this global cross-border payment stuff and then how do you think about differentiation against these other names? Actually, Lex, this may be surprising to you. I celebrate the success of all the actors in the industry because I actually think the buffet is big enough that everyone can eat here and the innovation actually makes all the firms better. So how do we work? We have about 7,000 routes served, 100 local bank and PSP relationships, a very smart routing system optimized for speed and price and volume, a onboarding, very compliant onboarding process for everyone from freelancers and micro businesses and SMBs, including those multi-antity SMBs that I described in 190 countries and territories. We may be the only or one of the only scale global fintechs that are doing what I just described. In terms of how our financial stack works, we give customers the basic ability to pay, get paid, and hold balances and those multiple currencies. I imagine you and I'll talk about the additional new rails of stablecoins, adding the promise of stablecoins is what the multi-currency promise that Paynear has pioneered over the last 21 years. What we're really doing is helping customers be local to their end customers wherever they do business and whether they're invoicing a customer or integrating into their billing or leveraging all the multiple payment methods, getting paid and paying someone is the central nervous system of how modern business works and we're enabling that to happen. We're on the ground in 30 countries, which I think is substantial. Today, a third of our revenue is B2B and it grew 27% in Q3. We are taking share of the local banks and we are delivering lots of value. Whether you're thinking of Revolut or New Bank or Air Wallix or any of the fine firms that are providing lots of value to individuals or trying to provide some value to micro businesses, I think our focus on the multi-entity, larger SMB is unique in this landscape and we have I think a lot of runway in front of us. So from an naive perspective, the product architecture is lots of local bank accounts across the world and then an internal ledger that you're maintaining to kind of net the effects across all the different locations. That is a much more simple way of answering your own questions. So well done. Just checking. Thank you for helping. Okay, and then when you look at global corridors for where the economic activity and then your payments tooling and card product and so on have the most traction, what are the corridors that you're seeing growth in? As a public firm, we share our results quarterly and you can see the success we've had in Latin America, the success we've had across APAC, the strength of our business in greater China, the momentum we're seeing in the Middle East. I just pulling up, if you look at our our revenue growth in Q3 year over year, China was up 12% APAC was 25%, Latin was 21%. And what's really exciting about our business is we've seen take rate expansion. And I think it's rarely discussed, but many of the financial technology firms have seen take rate compression or they're buying volumes. We've actually seen take rate expansion and profit margin expansion in our business. So we are seeing a healthier, stronger portfolio of customers and a significantly healthier and stronger P&L. What's driving that? Is it increased economic growth in those geographies and you were there early and so you're winning more share or better products? Is it some sort of globalization? Yeah, I'd say yes, yes, and yes. I mean in Latin American APAC take rates are greater. Our brand is powerful, our execution is exceptional and our product suite is meets the needs of our customers. We just we acquired a year ago, a little over a year ago, workforce management business. So now our customers are not only using P&U or to P&U. pay and get paid with their customers, their supply chains, or paying contractors, they're turning to Paynear to handle their global employer of record needs. So if you're hiring people in 30 countries with a click of a button, you can do it in a compliant way with a Paynear solution and that business is growing exceptionally small, but growing exceptionally well. I think that the success is focused. The delivering certainty inside the organization and clarity has helped us deliver value to our customers because everyone at Paynear is intensely focused on the segment of customers that we're super serving and we're not distracted by the noise that other folks are making about their success. We're just delivering hours. When you look at being a public company, I'd love to talk to you about that experience about the kind of the SPAC transaction and then being in the markets since the SPAC transaction. You have pretty impressive fundamental growth in almost a steady line over the last four years and yet there's been all this public market volatility. I really enjoy actually running the business as a public company. I think for a few reasons. The transparency is I think a strength. Our customers are proud to know that they can understand our financials. They like that we're listed on NASDAQ. Our global customers recognize that that's an achievement of our organization. I like that our investments we've made in compliance technology have paid off and so our trust among regulators around the world and our bank partners around the world is very high. I think it's important to be straight. 2025 was an intense year in a tough environment. Markets and the macro have been exceptionally volatile and the payment sentiment has been weak and the noise around the macro and payments has been everywhere. But despite all of that noise, our business has gotten substantially stronger and healthier. We are managing the business for decades, not quarters and I think that's just the way I view it. I don't know. I got to check up the other day and he said, you have the blood pressure of a 15 year old, you can handle the stress and that's just the truth. Our business is really solid and our team is kick ass and we're hell bent and focused. When you are those things, over time you create a lot of shareholder value. I want to acknowledge for investors that it is not lost on me that our good work and our hard work and our exceptional results have yet to be reflected in our stock price and that is important that we deliver for our shareholders and we are very committed to doing so. I found that after the SPAC boom, a lot of Fintech assets became misunderstood by the markets and people couldn't tell high quality companies from things that were taken to market opportunistically. Another example, very different example would be something like the neo bank Dave. I talked to them in the middle of I think 2023 when post back they had got down 95%. But if you look at their economics, it was just a straight line up and they've had a tremendous recovery from 24, not all the way, but pretty much to their SPAC valuation. Do you feel like the public market still kind of misunderstand what Paneer does and are there ways to tap into some of the payments, stories and narratives that are out in the market now? Previously you had mentioned stable coins, circle if you look at their profitability roughly in your neighborhood. But it feels like these stories have so much power. Let's actually talk about that. If we think about the things that are, let's talk about stable coins first. For the multi currency wallet that Paneer is built, we will in the first half of next year add stable coin to our wallet. Today you can't buy a hammer in Vietnam with USDC. You actually need to convert it into the local currency just like you couldn't buy a hammer in Vietnam with the Argentinian peso. The last mile which we are exceptionally strong is how the promise of B2B stable coin payments becomes a thing. Absent that is just rhetoric. It is true. We hold $7.5 billion a customer funds and $85 billion moving west to east or north to south primarily in the Paneer platform. When we look at our opportunities, it relates to stable coin. I think the key is that we deliver substance and not hype. That's what our organization is doing. I think the race is long and we feel confident about where we will set. Another area that people have been, I think maybe naive when they thought about Paneer, is that they viewed our interest revenue as they misunderstood our interest revenue. $7.5 billion of funds and earning a couple of hundred million of interest revenue on that is a strength, not a weakness because our customers hold our funds with us because they trust us. We earn yield on that. We monetize when our customers use those funds. Our balances are up 17% year over year and hundreds of millions of dollars of money is moving out of local bank accounts, into Paneer accounts, such that our customers can use our AP products. I think considering Paneer as interest exposes naive to both the customer value as well as the hedges we've put in place to deal with interest rate fluctuations. I'd say that finally, a criticism of Paneer has been, "Hey, you're 20% of your revenue is China to the US." I think it is certainly true 25 and the tariffs has been an earthquake through the cross-border distribution of physical goods, but when you scratch in and understand what's happening to the global economy, Chinese exports are essential for global retailers. I think failing to see the role that China and Paneer, Paneer, and the cross-border economy is, "This is the mark." There is certainly tariff policy, but 90% of the toys and baby strollers and hangers, or the things that people buy that are sold on Amazon and Walmart and eBay and Etsy, are not going to be on-short or near-short any time. Over 50% of Amazon products are, I believe, are manufactured in China. In the three areas that are, I think, casual criticisms of Paneer, I believe people have not seen it clearly enough. While the broader sentiment in the payment sector may have been negative, and some of that is outside of our control, what is in our control is how we execute and deliver, and that's why the board approved the $300 million buyback. We've been ramping that up as we've talked about publicly. We see real value in the business we're building, and we believe others well as well. When you think back to the conversation we had about global supply chains and consumer behavior, I'm trying to think of how to contrast that with the tariff shock, and we can put interest rates to the side, because that affects pretty much all financials equally. If you're holding deposits or if you're doing payments, that's going to impact everybody. You're talking about the arbitrage or delta that comes from a change in the political environment. What is more malleable? What is more or less fragile? The value chains that you're talking about where people have built these over years and years, and you've got these consumer behaviors. On the other side, the new economics of what could be global commerce. Where do you see that change and bend based on the last 15 years of what you've been doing? Where should we expect to see the give? Yeah, it's a super interesting question. I'll have to think about how I would answer that. And which is awkward on a podcast, I said, imagine what I see is there is certainly room for financial technology firms like ours to bundle a broad set of products to customers. And to see, actually continue to take great expansion in doing that, because the value you're creating for customers continues to expand. I think of Amazon and what they've done with Prime is a really good example of that. I do think some of the give will be the more commodity platforms and companies will get squeezed by the firms that have a broad set of solutions for their customers. And then in this environment where trust with regulators is extraordinarily important, a network of licenses and bank relationships and interoperability between those becomes really important. I don't think the geopolitical environment makes global regulation less important. I actually think the trust economy becomes more valuable. And that's why we've built a lot of money. a very exceptional global licensing office and have continued to build trusted relationships with the folks that govern our ability to provide value to our customers. I think we've covered some of the future trends, but I'm curious in terms of the company itself. How do you think about the different paths to growth? If you're looking at these new technologies and whether stable coins or long tail on an off-ramps and things like that, blockchains for ledgers, are there things that you're looking to grow internally? Or we know that Stripe, you know, spent a billion in change on bridge, and then I think BVNK was in the news for being acquired to be a stable coin engine as well. Are you thinking about inorganic paths to growth in terms of incorporating things into your footprint? And then similarly, are you thinking about kind of larger plays as well to expand the company? Yeah, so I think this is really important. We've done three acquisitions during my tenure, all sub-hundred million dollars. We have about five hundred million dollars on our balance sheet. And as I said at the top, generating two hundred million dollars or free cash flow, there is, I think, some rational thinking starting to happen in the private markets as it relates to some of the fintech firms that have had single-digit millions of dollars of revenue, but have a five hundred X multiple that seems irrational to me. So we are considering a set of acquisitions that I think can continue to expand the products and services we offer to our current customers as well as open us up into new geographies and additional verticals. But the first and most important thing we can do to drive both our growth and profitability is focus internally and execute effectively. And that's the priority of the firm. I do think cross-border payments of which were one of the top five firms for sure to be a top ten global fintech, not just in cross-border. You need to get to a trillion dollars in volume. And so over the next decade from my chair here at 85 billion and I'll round up to a hundred billion dollars, we're focused on a march and a climb to aggregate more volume in the niches that we currently serve, primarily in the SMB SME segment for cross-border businesses. But as you know, we serve freelancers, micro businesses. There's a, we have visibility that we serve enterprises. We have visibility into all of these different segments as well as the corridors and geographies. So what's been exciting to think about as we drive our growth and profitability agenda is looking at our own data, seeing the trends and thinking about are there products, services or companies and teams that bring the kind of entrepreneurial DNA, creativity and value that if we add to the pay and ear, stack the leverage on a common platform is pretty exceptional. And so I do believe we will be more inquisitive over time, build by and partner to continue to scale. Thank you, John, for a fantastic conversation. If our listeners want to learn more about you or pay and ear, where should they go? I guess I'd say LinkedIn or reach out to us to pay and ear. We are really believe in the power of the FinTech ecosystem and are interested in learning about folks who are doing innovative things and sharing what we're learning because we do think we should all be collaborating with one another and paying ear, you know, we're visible and we are here to support your listeners, your audience, if they need workforce management support, global payment support where they have creative ideas they want to share with us. We are certainly eager and available. Fantastic. Thanks so much for joining me today. Thanks, Alex. Hi, everyone. That's it for this week's episode of the FinTech Blueprint. For more technical deep dives into all things FinTech and decentralized finance, check out FinTechBlueprint.com and grab a free subscription to the newsletter. This is Lex and I'll see you next time.