Who is Yuval Tal?

Businessman and entrepreneur Yuval Tal was born in Israel and currently lives in the Tel Aviv suburb

Tal enrolled at Tel Aviv University at 1988 and got his BSc in mechanical engineering four years later. He subsequently started to study for his biomedical engineering MSc, minor in Business Administration, at the same university, which took him four years to get.

Professional Experience

Yuval Tal has over 20 years of experience in Internet commerce-related technology startups. He is an expert in currency exchange, security technologies and prepaid card applications. He is the founder of Payoneer, which he established in 2005. Payoneer offers a simple but powerful online payment solution that has successfully secured and delivered several millions of online payments to people all around the world. The Payoneer solution includes a prepaid MasterCard® card that enables thousands of online businesses to send and receive online payments.

Yuval Tal has developed two patented methods that offer new ways for payment transfer and multiple currency transactions, most noted in Payoneer. He has worked for more than 20 years on streamlining the payment process and cutting out banks as the middle-man, along with his contemporaries. In addition to having access to a simpler money transfer process, consumers now are not bound to international money order fees and other big-bank hassles. For example, when one calls Payoneer, they immediately receive live customer service rather than automation. By using lateral thinking, creativity and technological know-how, today’s Internet Age inventors have changed the way people receive and spend money.

Payoneer's headquarters are in New York City and as president, Yuval Tal is in charge of managing and directing the company's 100 employees, who are professionals from the finance and technology industries.

Payoneer's clients come from a wide array of industries, including content providers, web merchants, game developers, online add networks, online affiliate networks, stock photography, pharmaceuticals, online marketing, clinical trials and more. The company is privately owned, and its funding partners are Greylock Partners, Crossbar Capital and Carmel Ventures.

Prior to the founding of Payoneer, Tal was the co-founder of one of the first successful enablers of global e-commerce, E4X Inc., now known as Fifty One Global E-Commerce. E4X Inc., which started operations in 1999 and provided clients with online cross-border payments, grew under Yuval's leadership. The blue chip accounts garnered by the company are what allowed E4X Inc. to turn a profit in record time and to be valued in excess of $500 million in just five years of inception.

The company, while based in New York, manages many currencies, payments, and orders in various locations around the globe. Its international clients can often make these orders with the monetary system of their native country because Fifty One can process the orders and payments in so many different forms of currency. FiftyOne is also known worldwide as being one of the first companies to provide US merchants the ability to sell and market their brands and merchandise in the customer's choice of international currency (even when it's not American.) Merchants that took advantage of this include the clothing brand Anthropologie and e-commerce drugstore site Drugstore.com.

Yuval Tal has also been successfully involved in other internet startups. He was CEO of R-U-Sure Ltd., an Israeli company that provided comparative shopping, and Director of Business Development for Radware Ltd., a global leader and award winning provider of comprehensive integrated application delivery solutions.

Personal

Yuval Tal has many varied interests besides business. One of them is the field of photography, which he has a fascination with. He took five photography courses in New York, including courses at the New School for General Studies and New School of Design Parsons. Parsons is considered to be a pioneer in art and design education, and its alumni include artists, scholars and businesspeople.

Tal is a dedicated runner. He participated in the 10-kilometer Nike Night Run in Tel Aviv in 2010 and went through a triathlon, a multi-sport event that includes, besides running, cycling and swimming in succession. Yuval Tal also drives a motorbike.