Israeli fintech company Payoneer is embarking on a significant cutback process

Four months after appointing a new CEO, the Israeli fintech company Payoneer is embarking on a significant cutback process.
The company, which is traded on Nasdaq at a value of 1.7 billion dollars, will say goodbye to 200 employees, which make up about 10% of its workforce. At this stage, the final number of those laid off in Israel is not known. Today Pioneer employs about half of its approximately 2,000 employees in Israel, where it is concentrated The main part of its development effort, Calcalist learned. The start of the move was expected this week.
Pioneer, established in 2005, was over the years one of the most promising unicorns in Israel. The company operates in the payments and clearing market for small and medium-sized businesses, estimated by the company at 5 trillion dollars, with 90% of it still based on traditional payment transfer methods. Pioneer's business model is based on collecting a commission from the payments made on its platform that operates in 190 countries, when recently it also launched a dedicated solution together with the credit card giant Mastercard. Pioneer was issued through a merger with Spak on Nasdaq at a value of 3.3 billion dollars in June 2021. In the IPO, the company raised more than a billion dollars, some of which went to the company's coffers and some to the founders and longtime shareholders, including former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett who invested in the company at its beginning.
The layoffs at Pioneer come both against the backdrop of the macroeconomic situation and following the management's desire to move to profitable growth. Thus, for example, in the first quarter of 2023 the volume of payments between businesses made on Pioneer's platform was lower than expected. Most of the layoffs are expected to focus on the marketing and service departments, while the damage to the development sector will be low, which also means that the share of those laid off in Israel is expected to be relatively small. Last March, John Kaplan, who until then served for a period of nine months as co-CEO alongside Scott Galit, who worked for 12 years in senior positions at Pioneer, took the CEO seat. Galit moved to serve as a consultant and member of the board of directors. At the same time, a new CFO was also appointed. The new management announced its new strategy, which includes a focus on large and profitable customers, an emphasis on profitable growth and building the new generation of its payments platform. Upon taking office, the new CEO noted that a quarter of Pioneer's customers generate most revenues and activity, so from now on it will focus marketing and services on these half a million customers.
Pioneer stated in response: "Like any responsible company, Pioneer examines measures for the accuracy of the organization. In addition, we are recruiting dozens of developers and product managers in Israel to build its financial cloud." Around Pioneer, they add that the plan to recruit 150 employees to the development center in Israel, which the company announced last March, is still in effect.