Where His Customers Actually Are

"You have no idea how having a Payoneer account validates my business," a customer in Egypt once told him, Caplan recalled. His customers are exporters of goods and services who sit, as he put it, "below the threshold of what the multinational banks will serve," or in countries where compliance costs make those banks walk away. Payoneer's answer has been physical presence, including staff "on the ground in Lahore, Pakistan."

He thinks the map of who matters is being redrawn. "I don't think New York, Paris, London, Milan, Hong Kong are the future. I think it's Jakarta and Bangalore and Hangzhou," he said. The pandemic settled the point for him: "It doesn't matter where you sleep."

The Waitlist And The Hype

Payoneer built its stablecoin product with Bridge, the infrastructure firm Stripe owns, rather than construct one. "That's the best way to be an entrepreneur, right? Is to be in the market as opposed to in the PowerPoint slide. So we're in the friggin' market," Caplan said.

Roughly 17,000 businesses signed up for the waitlist, he said, flagging that he was working from memory: "I'm rounding, I think down, but I don't remember exactly the number." The ones asking to hold token balances, he noted, "no surprise, are in markets where there is most currency volatility." Wallet operators serving those regions describe identical behavior. "They're using it more like a equal dollar account rather than a trading wallet," Alvin Kan, chief operating officer of Bitget Wallet, said on the On The Margin podcast.

Payoneer has also applied for a national trust bank charter that would let it issue a token of its own, joining a queue of banks and fintechs planning the same thing. Caplan called it "a building block, not the finish."

His enthusiasm stops there. Even with stablecoin volumes now rivaling legacy rails like ACH, he said, "this is like all new markets, the rhetoric is actually exceeding the reality." Speed alone does not impress him. Zapping money across the planet in a nanosecond, he said, "seems cool. The reality is it's what you do with your money that's cool, not how quickly it moves." He compared the hype to Meta's smart glasses: "Yeah, that's cool, but I don't wanna wear those around."

"Sometimes it can be a selling apple. Not an eating apple. It actually can be people really want it. They're not quite sure if they can articulate why," he said.

The Question About Interest

"They're saying to Payoneer, hey, we trust you. You have this percentage of our of our payout volume and our AP volume. Can we integrate that into our stablecoin account?" Caplan said, describing the request he gets.

There is a problem underneath it. Payoneer earns interest on billions of dollars of customer funds, a meaningful share of its revenue. Stablecoins move those balances onto tokens where the issuer keeps the yield, and the volumes are no longer marginal. I asked him about it.

He pointed back to the charter, which would put Payoneer on the issuing side instead of watching the float leave. He also does not think the demand he sees now is the trade that threatens him. The customers he wants are not the ones "trying to repatriate it and I don't want to pay 7% to Coinbase," he said. They are businesses stuck converting tokens back into money they can spend, who have "knit together sort of sort of hacky solutions to get it into fiat that are expensive." Operators building those rails describe the same chokepoint. "The on-chain leg has to synchronize with the off-chain leg, which is the fiat part where payouts are happening," Raj Kamal, co-founder and CEO of TransFi, said on the On The Margin podcast.

Trust Costs More Than Price

"Price isn't the number one thing cross border customers care about when it comes to payments. It's certainty and trust," Caplan said. I have some sympathy for that. A decade ago I ran a property-management business in the Caribbean, Stripe stopped serving the market, and the processor I moved to ran off with its clients' money.

He is unsentimental about what that trust is worth. "You can't charge someone more than the value you create for them," he said, before warning about products that outrun their usefulness: "I don't know how many Pelotons were sold when you realize it's actually a coat hanger, but you spent two grand on a coat hanger."

The challengers do not worry him much, and he is careful to say he likes them. "I can't love entrepreneurs and not love the entrepreneurs that are trying to disrupt us," he said. "The buffet is big enough for us all to get fat." Then the caveat: "Every Y Combinator class, there's half a dozen that compete," and the ones that stall do so for unglamorous reasons. "You gotta be careful not to let your marketing message eat your P and L." Investor friends call him about it: "Hey, I put some money in a thing to disrupt you, it's all sideways."

"This Sh*t's Not Gonna Stop"

Asked whether tariffs had hurt his customers, Caplan described businesses that adapted. "They diversified their both their supply chains and their distribution. Their businesses are healthier as a result of it," he said.

He thinks artificial intelligence tilts the same way. "If you’re a Bangladeshi entrepreneur with 25 employees and AI, your cost basis and your capability now rivals that of the firm in Chicago or London or Milan or Mexico City," he said. The gap between the coverage and the customers is what he notices: "it feels like the sky is falling and then you talk to somebody who’s running a BPO in the Philippines and they’re like, What are you talking about, John? My business is up. This is what I’m doing. I’m on offense." Businesses fight for survival from day zero, he said, so "this sh*t's not gonna stop."

He expects the shape of his own deal to repeat. "I think consolidation will come," he said, naming Revolut and Nubank as the firms pushing incumbents to move. The challenger banks, he said, are forcing the guys in suits to "innovate or die. And obviously the big guys won't die, but they better innovate."