Shares of payments company Payoneer closed about 1.5% lower after its market debut Monday on the Nasdaq, giving it a market cap of just over $1 billion.
The company went public by merging with FTAC Olympus Acquisition Corp., a blank-check company run by Bancorp founder Betsy Cohen. The shares were previously listed under the ticker FTOCU for Cohen’s special purpose vehicle. At the time of the deal’s announcement in February, Payoneer was valued at $3.3 billion.
Cohen and her team were in on the SPAC trend before 2020′s mania began: FTAC is their fourth fintech-focused shell company. One 2018 SPAC announced a merger agreement late last year with payments provider Paya. Another, which went public in January 2017, combined with International Money Express. FinTech Acquisition, which went public in February 2015 combined with CardConnect, was later acquired by First Data for roughly $750 million.
Special purpose acquisition companies, known as SPACs, raise money through a shell company to buy an existing firm and have become increasingly popular in the past year.
Payoneer specializes in facilitating cross-border payments. The New York City-based fintech start-up was started in 2005 by Yuval Tal, an Israeli entrepreneur who helped start other tech and e-commerce payment companies. Scott Galit joined as CEO in 2010 after years at First Data and Mastercard. In March, the company partnered with Mastercard to offer small businesses a digital payments card.
There are more than 5 million users on Payoneer’s platform, and the company works with more than 150 different currencies, specializing in cross-border payments. Airbnb, Amazon, Google and freelance jobs platform Upwork are among its corporate customers, as well as millions of independent contractors and small businesses.
The two-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company is the latest New York-based company to hit the public markets, joining a growing roster that includes names like Etsy, MongoDB and Peloton. While the biggest offerings have typically come from Silicon Valley and San Francisco, 2021 is turning out to be a blockbuster year for New York, with DigitalOcean, UiPath and Compass all having gone public already.
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