Featured Attendee: Scott Reynolds

ScottReynolds Headshot 413x350

01Scott Reynolds
General Manager, B2B Payment Services — Payoneer Escrow


FAST FACTS

Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Domain name you wish you owned: It would be cool to own my own name (scottreynolds.com)
Favourite extension: .ca (I’m from Canada)
Currently reading: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Your mentor: My father

Q&A

Describe your company. How long have you been there and what led you to this career choice?
Payoneer is a global payments company, with over 1000 employees working around the world, offering a range of escrow and cross-border payment solutions. I joined the company in March 2017 when Payoneer acquired a startup I founded called Armor Payments. Ten years ago, I stumbled into the payments industry when I joined MasterCard (and then PayPal), and I’ve been fascinated with the space ever since.  Very few other industries have the same impact on day to day lives as how people and companies pay and get paid.

NamesCon is all about business networking. Can you tell us a story about the success of a meeting at NamesCon?
When I attended my first NamesCon last year, I was amazed at the passion and energy buzzing in the hallways, during the sessions, and on the exhibition floor.  The event provided me with an intense (though exciting) introduction to the domain industry.  I’m definitely eager to come back for more this year!

Can you tell us about how your service or product helps deliver value to your customers?
With Payoneer Escrow, we aim to make each and every domain transaction secure, predictable, and even boring by providing a simple and reliable escrow payment service.  There is incredible complexity behind the scenes, but our job is to allow buyers, sellers, and brokers to buy and sell domain names with ease and security.  Collecting and processing payments globally, managing challenging regulatory environments, and accounting for every single penny are just a few things we do day in and day out for our customers.

How does your career compare to what you envisioned in your youth?
Growing up in Canada, my dream was to be another Wayne Gretzky every time I laced up my hockey skates.  Although I still play hockey on a weekly basis, I’m sorry to say that I’m now playing for the reward of a beer after the game, rather than the Stanley Cup.  So, I settled on a business career that has been rewarding and diverse, but is still far from my original plan of playing for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

What kinds of changes to you foresee within the industry in the next year? The next five years?
As in other industries, we continue to see the domain world flatten, with individuals and companies doing business with others from all corners of the globe.  I expect to see that trend accelerate, despite efforts from certain political leaders to close our borders.  With services like Payoneer enabling easy, low cost, secure payment options, it is becoming easier and easier to do business without the limitations of national borders.

What are the most innovative products or services that are currently impacting your business?
With bitcoin rising toward $20k, we hear a great deal of buzz but very few actual customer inquiries.  Although we haven’t yet seen much direct impact, I expect crypto currencies like bitcoin and ether to become more and more mainstream.  Even more exciting from my perspective is the promise for radical change that the underlying blockchain represents.  It seems like we’re just scratching the surface, with limited impact today, but I expect distributed ledger technology make a dramatic impact on payments and a range of other business operations.

What are you most looking forward to at the upcoming NamesCon?
It’s clearly the people that make this event so valuable, so for me, it’s meeting with the wide range of individuals involved in the domain industry – hearing their stories, learning from their experience, and being energized by their passion.

What was one of your biggest “A-ha!” moments in life?
I remember specifically the moment I decided to launch my first company. I was working for a struggling startup, and I realized that there was the seed of a great idea buried in the company’s jumbled business strategy. I also realized that with my background and experience, I was uniquely well positioned to execute on that great idea. I resigned within the month, and launched Armor Payments. That decision changed my life, as I officially became an entrepreneur. The next few years offered a wild ride, ultimately resulting in the acquisition of Armor Payments by Payoneer.

If you had 15 extra minutes each day, what would you do with them?
Lack of time seems to be one of life’s greatest challenges. Wow, what I wouldn’t do for more time each day. Where would I start? Spend more time with my family, get more work done, actually do some deeper thinking about bigger opportunities. Wait, I only get 15 more minutes?  Not enough…


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