Nagesh Devata and the trouble with getting paid

Nagesh Devata spent part of a weekend going through two years of his own bank statements, adding things up manually. This is a pleasingly awkward admission from a payments executive. Even someone whose working life concerns the movement of money can lose a piece of his weekend to finding out where it went.

He brought up the experience in a conversation about small businesses expanding overseas. The point was practical: a company cannot scale by making that sort of exercise a habit. A personal chore becomes a business bottleneck when the statements multiply, the currencies change and someone needs an answer before the next supplier gets paid.

Based in Singapore, Devata leads Asia Pacific for Payoneer. His career has passed through Mastercard and PayPal, giving him a view of commerce from card acceptance to online marketplaces. Across those jobs, the interesting question has become less about whether a buyer can find a seller and more about whether the financial arrangements can keep up once they do.

Before a sale could cross a border

At Mastercard, Devata worked on acceptance, acquiring and strategic merchants in Asia Pacific. Acceptance sounds like an agreeable personality trait. In payments, it concerns the rather more consequential business of making a payment method usable at a merchant. A card in a pocket is only useful if someone at the other end can take it.

By March 2016, he was group head of Merchant & Acceptance Development for Asia Pacific, speaking about a partnership with AccorHotels. It covered more than 550 hotels across 17 countries. Cardholders were being offered privileges at participating properties through a relationship between the card network and the hotel group. The work brought travel, retail spending and customer loyalty into the same commercial arrangement.

That episode provides a concrete glimpse of his professional world before Payoneer: established companies, regional distribution and partnerships that made one service more valuable through another. The traveller saw the offer. Behind it sat the arrangement between businesses. Devata's later work would keep returning to those connections, even as the businesses and the payment methods changed.

At PayPal, he oversaw Southeast Asia and an international cross-border channel portfolio. He joined Payoneer in 2020. The move carried him into a business serving sellers, service exporters and other companies working across markets. His regional remit included enterprise expansion; by 2022, he was publicly writing and speaking as Payoneer's senior vice president for APAC.

A Korean door opens

One useful test of a payments partnership is whether it changes where a business can sell. In October 2021, Payoneer and Coupang announced an arrangement intended to make it easier for international sellers to enter South Korea. The programme combined payments capabilities with help getting sellers onto the marketplace.

The details were less glamorous than the destination, and more useful. Sellers from markets including China, Germany, Japan, Britain and the United States were offered faster access to funds and more flexibility in managing multiple currencies. A Green Channel programme added specialised onboarding support. Access to customers and access to the proceeds of a sale were being considered together.

Devata spoke for Payoneer as its APAC vice president. The partnership is a useful marker in his career because it makes the regional job tangible. South Korea was a specific market with a specific platform. A seller needed a workable route into it. The payment relationship helped create that route, alongside the support required to start using it.

The region refuses to be one market

In 2021, Devata described how payments had changed since his early Mastercard years. Transactions had moved from a physical, domestic setting towards digital experiences with fewer human touchpoints. For smaller businesses, that shift widened the possible customer base beyond the home country. An international buyer had become a realistic prospect.

He also resisted treating Southeast Asia as a uniform destination. Economies, societies and regulatory environments differed. Access to suitable financial services remained uneven. His account of digital commerce held opportunity and difficulty in the same frame: more potential customers were reachable, but participation still depended on the systems available to the people trying to trade.

In his 2022 writing, that concern became advice about local knowledge. Sellers needed to understand differences in consumer behaviour, payment preferences and market maturity. A business expanding from Singapore would encounter different conditions elsewhere. Partners who understood those conditions mattered. The map might look compact on a presentation slide; operating across it required considerably more attention.

In October 2023, he used survey findings to describe the mismatch between international activity and financial readiness. More than 90 percent of the SMEs surveyed were sending and receiving payments across at least three countries. Nearly half identified payment obstacles as a substantial barrier to doing business globally. These were already international businesses, coping with the consequences of that fact.

His suggested responses included researching markets, using local expertise and forming partnerships. He also pointed to technology that could improve coordination across regions. The advice put preparation alongside ambition. A company might have a product worth buying overseas and still need help understanding the commercial environment in which it would be paid.

Singapore makes it official

In August 2023, Payoneer Singapore received a Major Payment Institution licence from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. The announcement covered account issuance, domestic and cross-border transfers, e-money issuance and merchant acquisition. These are the sorts of nouns that rarely improve a dinner conversation. For a payments business, they describe what it is permitted to do.

Devata described Singapore as central to regional expansion and connected the approval with the company's technology, risk management and compliance arrangements. The licence belonged to the Singapore subsidiary. Its significance in his public account was the foundation it supplied for extending local services and working with partners.

The current MAS directory lists Payoneer Singapore as a Major Payment Institution and names Devata among its key personnel. His regional growth work thus sits beside a visible relationship with the local regulated entity. Expansion has an administrative address as well as a commercial ambition.

The customer has already done the hard part

Devata's small-business emphasis has a personal component. In a Payoneer careers video, he says he has also been an entrepreneur. He connects that experience with his attention to customers and with the way he wants colleagues to respond to their difficulties. The ambition is to get a team, including partners and colleagues elsewhere, to feel responsibility for the business at the other end.

His discussion of Pakistan in January 2026 offers a more detailed view of those businesses. He described software companies, gaming studios, creative services firms and other exporters moving towards more structured international operations. In his account, recurring contracts increased the importance of predictable payments, organised invoicing and a clear picture of incoming funds.

He pointed to Guava Slice Games, a Pakistani studio recognised at Payoneer's 2025 XBorder Excellence Awards, as an example of the connection between payment reliability and international relationships. He described a business working with overseas partners and needing dependable cash flow to sustain production and growth. The example was about the work a studio could get on with once collecting its money became more manageable.

His stated motivation is similarly specific. He talks about entrepreneurs expanding into a neighbouring market or across the world, and the opportunity to help them do it. The aspiration recurs across his interviews: give smaller companies a workable way to participate in commerce beyond their home market.

Someone has to own the problem

Asked which Payoneer working principle he connects with, Devata chooses ownership. He talks about accountability, responsibility and urgency, and about taking on a problem rather than handing it to somebody else. It is a demanding definition of teamwork: having a colleague available does not automatically make the difficulty that colleague's job.

“Do It Own It”

The working principle Devata singles out

Outside Payoneer, he serves on the executive committee of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Singapore, which welcomed him as a director in 2023. That places him in another network of people working across national and commercial boundaries. Partnerships are a recurring feature of his career, whether the participants are merchants, payment companies or a business chamber.

His view of the wider industry also favours collaboration. In 2023, he argued that fintech companies could work with established financial institutions to improve access, rather than treating competition as the only possible relationship. Regulatory support and products designed around customers were the other ingredients he identified. The emphasis fits a career built around getting separate organisations to make something work together.

A shopfront is only the beginning

By March 2026, Devata was writing about small companies developing operations in several jurisdictions early in their lives. His concern extended to the complications of separate entities: fragmented banking, reconciliation, local communication and the interval between incorporating a business and getting its finances working. The question had broadened from entering a market to running a company across several of them.

In October 2026, the same concern appeared in a concrete product announcement. Payoneer Checkout, powered by Stripe, became available to eligible Singapore-registered businesses selling through their own online stores. Devata described companies combining marketplaces with direct customer channels. The practical challenge was to accommodate different markets, currencies and payment habits while handling the resulting proceeds. Availability remained subject to eligibility and regulatory requirements.

The weekend with the statements makes a fitting counterweight to all this regional ambition. Devata has worked with card networks, online payments and international platforms. He also knows what it is to sit with financial records and do the sums. His career keeps returning to that distance between a transaction being possible and a business being able to live comfortably with everything that follows.