Career History

Since this was a relatively new role, and given how fast this part of the payments space was evolving, it was my responsibility to create the policies and procedures for what was acceptable and what wasn't from scratch.  This involved significant exchange and collaboration with our sales teams as they were the ones to bring the opportunities and had the familiarity with the market.  It also required extensive collaboration with the credit, fraud risk, chargebacks, and collections leadership to find the happy medium where a new partner is bringing in good revenue without posing an unacceptable level of risk to our platform.

This was challenging as we also had to be cognizant of the reality that the more difficult we made the application process for one of these new software partners, the less new partners we would have.  This is where my background in analytics became absolutely crucial.  We had to analyze what the true drivers of risk in these partnerships actually were, isolate and analyze them, and let that data inform the decision making process of what the policy should be to optimize net revenue (gross revenue - losses).

We also had to do this under the backdrop of the pandemic, which was accelerating the interest that a lot of tech companies had in monetizing their software.  There was an almost overnight shift to ecommerce and these software partners didn't want to miss out.

That said, I am proud of the work we did together--sales, partner oversight, and the leadership of the operational risk teams.  We were able to strike a balance that fueled ProPay's expansion to double the overall number of new merchant applications we were receiving while simultaneously decreasing our loss rate to historical lows.  We also decreased the time to revenue for new partners by optimizing the sign up process and backend supporting processes.

Based on the growth we were seeing, it became quickly apparent that I was unable to manage all the growth by myself.  As a result I was asked to create a team with two new team members to help manage the growth.  This was an incredible opportunity to take what I had built and operationalize it in a way that it could be scaled easily.

I learned a lot in this process--about myself and about management / leadership.  And I loved it.  I loved being in a position where I could invest in others and help them develop their skills while also taking what I had created and moving it to the next level.  The leadership part of my career was my favorite so far and is something I hope to return to in the future.

Along with building the team came a responsibility to manage the underwriting of a new type of partnership.  I was responsible for underwriting new Payment Facilitators who wanted to use our gateway services.  Whereas with our other partners, new Payment Facilitators assume the regulatory, legal, and operational compliance requirements in lieu of ProPay handling those functions.  As a result they have a rigorous underwriting process that requires that they prove their ability to maintain compliance with all the associated rules and regulations they would be assuming responsibility for.  This includes--credit, underwriting, fraud monitoring and mitigation, KYC, AML/BSA, collections, chargeback management and remediation, as well as funding related issues and a host of other considerations.

Given the complexity of these new relationships and the amount of time it takes to complete the approval process, I was the principal underwriter rather than having it be managed by an analyst on my team.  In my capacity underwriting prospective Payment Facilitators, I had to review their policies and procedures to ensure they were complete.  This provided an opportunity to evaluate a payments company holistically from an operational perspective and proved to be incredibly educational.  I participated in the successful registration of several payment facilitators.

The final additional responsibility that I assumed with this change was to interface with the Product development team to request enhancements to optimize our operations.  I would be the point of contact for the various operational leaders who needed enhancements and represent that to the Product organization.  My background in SQL, software development, and analytics proved vital to this role as I was able to communicate the value of these enhancements in a way that wasn't possible previously.