Bea Ordonez Of Payoneer: Smart. Strategic. Unstoppable.

Forbes

13-05-2025

Bea Ordonez is the CFO of Payoneer, the financial technology company empowering the world's small and medium-sized businesses to transact, do business, and grow globally. Payoneer was founded in 2005 with the belief that talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. It is their mission to enable any entrepreneur and business to participate and succeed in an increasingly digital global economy. Since its founding, they have built a global financial stack that removes barriers and simplifies cross-border commerce. They make it easy for millions of SMBs and entrepreneurs, particularly in emerging markets, to connect to the global economy and grow their businesses.
Bea and I recently had an engaging conversation about her wide range of career experience and how it has impacted her career, being a critical voice in diversity initiatives, driving growth in today's global economy, and more.
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Ba Ordonez is someone who has been shaped by various international influences. She grew up in Tottenham, a neighborhood in London, England. Born to Spanish immigrants, she attended public schools in London and at 18 headed to university. She graduated from the University of Nottingham with a Bachelor of Law, and from there, has held roles in London, Bermuda, Florida and New York City.
Her love of the law helped her understand her natural gift as a problem-solver. She always had an interest in finance, something that has served her well in her chosen field in terms of the real intersection between financial services, regulated financial services, and technology.
At Payoneer, CFO Bea Ordonez is reimagining what leadership looks like—where purpose, performance, ... More and inclusion converge to drive global impact.
Case in point: After working as a tax consultant and in the reinsurance industry, she earned her first CFO role in 1999 at G-Trade, a startup broker-dealer. Since then, she has held roles as Chief Operating Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, and Chief Financial Officer for various public and private companies in the financial services and fintech space.
She currently serves as CFO of Payoneer, a mission-driven financial platform that serves more than 2 million small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and entrepreneurs, especially in emerging markets. The company covers a very diverse and broad geographical footprint and connects SMBs across the world to a rising and increasingly global and digital economy.
'When I talk about a mission, it's based on our view that talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not,' she said. 'One of the ways in which opportunity is not equally distributed is in access to the financial system. We read about it here in the U.S., with unbanked consumers and so on, but on a global scale, access to the financial system is also not equally distributed. For small and medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs globally, the ability to do straightforward things is critical to their business. To pay, get paid, and to manage their global operations—is both critical and complex. At Payoneer, we look to solve the complexity with a purpose-built financial stack designed to meet the needs of SMBs and entrepreneurs, and to make it easier for them to operate on a global scale.'
As CFO, Ordonez believes it is the wide range of experience she gained before coming on board that has prepared her for her current role.
'That broad experience has positioned me to love what I do and to excel at what I do,' she said. 'The role of the CFO has certainly evolved. It has become a much broader strategic role, requiring a real in-depth understanding of what makes the business work operationally.'
Ordonez has had a less conventional path to CFO–namely, that she first stepped into the role at 26 at G-Trade. She then transitioned to a broader operational role as Chief Operating Officer, where she learned how to interface with technology teams to drive outcomes that were going to ignite growth, unlock leverage in the company, open up new markets, and potentially launch new business lines and products.
It is not lost on her that many people helped her to get to where she is. In fact, having such diverse work experience aligns with her approach to reach out to diverse colleagues wherever she's worked.
'I have always tried to cast a pretty wide net in any organization I have worked in,' she explained. 'I try to find the hidden gems in the organization. Maybe they think a little bit differently, have a perspective that is differentiating in some way. Intellectual curiosity is super important.'
One aspect of her own curiosity is where the industry is headed in the coming years. As someone who has worked at the intersection of traditional regulated financial services and technology companies for years, she believes it is a trend that people will see more as consumers. Ordonez says we will continue to see that increasingly different parts of the value chain are enabled by different entities in the broader financial landscape – with tech companies, fintech companies and more traditional financial players collaborating to deliver an integrated and frictionless customer experience across a range of financial products and experiences.
Payoneer has seen accelerating digital adoption by consumers, especially in emerging markets, while the pace of digitization of payments accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic as commerce became more digital and as marketplaces continued to evolve and innovate. Payoneer sits in the center of that ecosystem, looking to unlock the value for its customers.
Central to making that ecosystem thrive are the people with whom Ordonez surrounds herself. At Payoneer, her work depends on relationships that cross the globe and span multiple time zones–the company has boots on the ground in more than 30 countries. In a single day, she might speak with colleagues in China, India, London, and New York. The work rapport she has with her colleagues, team members, and fellow leaders is critical and was one of the primary reasons why she took the job.
'Ultimately, for me, as it is for most people, as we get to this point in our careers, it's about the people that you work with and the mission,' she said. 'The vision of the management team and the leadership resonated with me.'
Similarly, Ordonez has a clear vision for how she builds her team. She emphasizes the importance of not only measuring but also aligning with the team about what should be measured. That not only helps to create cohesion among the team but also drives the vision and strategic focus across the organization.
It can be challenging for a big global company with numerous locations. To mitigate that challenge, Ordonez encourages celebrating success, acknowledging mistakes, and experimentation to get to the best outcome.
'In a big global company with disparate folks sitting in many global locations, measuring progress is as critical as celebrating success,' she explained. 'Equally, and almost as important, is acknowledging mistakes and failures. Not in a finger-pointing, blame-allotting way, but in a 'we took a data-driven approach to this particular challenge,' or 'we took this approach to solving this problem, expecting outcome A, and we got outcome B, let's think about what series of decisions got us there.' Something that we have worked on developing is a culture of experimentation. It's been incredibly impactful to understand how the thing that you do impacts the customer experience, the customer's behavior, and the value that you are unlocking for them. If you measure that, take data from that, and drive it back into the process, you find that a data-driven approach to decision-making is so critical.'
As a leader, one value she prioritizes above most others is empathy. She says that building high-performing teams is possible only by being authentic and embracing not only who she is, but also who others are. It creates trust and collaboration.
Ordonez's belief in empathy and authenticity translates into a drive to empower others as a result of what she experienced early on in her career. Often the only woman in the room when she worked in the capital markets space or at trading companies, she now recognizes that women have made important strides in the finance world, but also that there is a long way to go.
'The pandemic lowered labor participation rates for women meaningfully,' she said. 'We still have a long way to go from an income parity perspective. It's still important for us to be thinking along those lines. A few things we should all think about in supporting women and others in the workplace: providing visible role models for them. It's something that I would have loved to have had as I came up in my career, someone who looked a bit or sounded a bit like me in the C-suite as a role model.'
To Ordonez, a strong team also ensures that people will be resilient in hard times. The fintech space is characterized by its volatility due to macro uncertainty, inflationary pressures, rising interest rates, geopolitical uncertainty, and many other factors. That's where diversity of opinion can help.
'In many ways, diversity is a natural resilience driver within our business more broadly, but you have to build resilience within your teams,' she emphasized. 'You have to acknowledge that you can't see around corners and work with the best data you have at your disposal. It's the data that can help you make the best possible decision-making, understanding that you don't know what's around those corners.'
Speaking of what might be in store for the future, Ordonez does have words of wisdom for the next generation of CFOs.
'Intellectual curiosity is key,' she said. 'Keep learning and cast a wide net. You can learn a lot from people who are buried in all sorts of strange parts of your organization and understand an area that you didn't understand before. Take the time to understand elements of the business that can seem mundane and routine, but are the machinery that drives the car. Finally, take on more. I never said no to anything along the way in terms of new responsibilities or new things to do. I always took on more if there was an opportunity, even if there wasn't a clear path to what it would mean for me. You'll benefit from that diversity of opportunity.'