Career History

In 2016 I was looking for work and was referred to ProPay by a friend who I spent time with as a missionary in Quebec Canada.  The position was French / English speaking and given my background I was a good fit for the position.  I didn't know anything about the payments industry but quickly became fascinated with the world that undergirds transaction experiences that are as ubiquitous as they are unremarkable (to most).

I spent about 2 and 1/2 years in Customer Service taking phone calls, chats, and responding to emails from merchant customers with questions about their accounts.  This time was pivotal to the rest of my career as I have relied upon my background and experience in customer service to help in other engagements I've had with clients and team members throughout my career.  This foundation has become an indispensable part of my skillset.

In 2018, shortly after getting married, I wanted to move to the next step in my career and expand my skills.  There was an opening for a Credit Analyst on the Underwriting team and I applied for and received the job.  In my role as a Credit Analyst I was responsible for reviewing requests from merchants to increase their monthly processing limits.  This was also my first exposure to SQL queries as the reports that we were running were SQL based.

I was fascinated at the versatility of SQL and started teaching myself.  I would reverse engineer existing reports and SQL queries and look up things that I didn't understand online.  The freedom to be able to unlock data insights with this new skill was infectious and was my first exposure to the value that can be realized when data is unlocked and provided to business end users.

This new skill set paid dividends almost immediately.  By the time I moved on from this position I had decreased the required time per review by ~30% while simultaneously decreasing the number of customer contacts by another ~25% by taking proactive action.  This increase in efficiency netted a more than 55% increase in productivity which was crucial since our merchant base was expanding significantly at that point.  In essence it ensured that the business could more than double the amount of reviews they got out of the same headcount.

There was also a lot of volatility in our team during this point.  Of the 4 analysts on the team, after I had been in the role for 9 months I was the only one who was still on the team as the other 3 analysts had pursued other opportunities.  This forced me into a leadership role very quickly but is something that I look back on with appreciation.  I was involved in the training of all 3 replacements and the additional 2 analysts that were added to the team during this period.  It prepared me very well for what came next which was my role as a team lead.