Diploma

Leading product direction for Accountero, a SaaS platform bringing together accountants and small businesses. Still in stealth mode but hoping to launch beta in Q4 2021.
Helping CEO set the overall strategic direction / partnerships for the company, both for Accountero and the broader SaasDirect platform.

Senior Director, Product Strategy

Left the tech world for a year to focus on a vision of becoming an ecologically-sound provider of energy.

Created a solar "utility" which operates solar farms/generators across multiple states and sells the generated power to school districts, cities, and other public utilities.
Negotiated acquisition and management agreements for over $10MM in solar generation facilities with multiple partners to build generation capacity.
Managing the hiccups that arise with each of these projects, from non-payment to technical issues to complex utility rules, and even the occasional grass-cutting emergency

Founder

Co-founded an Internet startup focused on creating mobile commerce information services.  Secured an agreement with a wireless service provider with more than fifteen million customers.  Led the business development efforts and coordinated engineering tasks with customer needs via putting together PRDs, timelines, and milestones.  Negotiated contracts and term sheets for various business transactions, consulting arrangements, and partnerships.

Director, Business Development & Product Management

Principal of a boutique investment bank and strategic consultancy focusing on private offerings (debt and equity) of entertainment-related companies.  Responsible for deal analysis and due diligence on potential investments and placements, as well as assisting copmanies with financial projections and strategy.

Most interesting challenge: Structuring and placing an investment-grade offering issued by heavy-metal band Iron Maiden.  My partners handled the placement, while I supported the structuring/modelling and the rating agency book.   Ultimately, Moody's and Fitch gave investment grade ratings on $28MM in debt, secured only by the Iron Maiden catalogue.

Vice President

Risk Management Consultant

Built the team within Dosh that, along with the Customer Support team, manages the various risk & fraud exposures inherent to an online loyalty & commerce platform. 

The team was the end-to-end owner for the three main elements of risk strategy:
1. Risk Product & Engineering (Features of the Dosh Mobile App and internal customer support tooling);
2. Risk Data (Features, Rules, and Models); and
3. Risk Policy (Defining schemes, responses, and escalation/appeals paths).

We worked together closely with the Customer Support team's Risk Specialists, who do the actual reviews of suspect accounts and handle any appeals.

In the quarter before I joined, losses from our primary loss pattern, affiliate abuse, exceeded $2MM. When I converted to a Consultant, we had moved that number to $50 and $500 in the previous two quarters. It was one of the rare times in my career where we did such a good job that the bad guys actually gave up.

Senior Director, Product & Risk

Identified areas in core risk/payments systems where critical improvements needed to be made and led implementation.  Results include an almost 3x improvement in device identification data availability (improving Compromised account detection), $10MM in clawed-back funds via a process for better managing chargebacks on a major network, and helping to stop a multimillion dollar series of fraud attacks on our systems by analyzing and helping to deliver a stronger payment credential integrity platform.

Built out inter- and intracompany relationships to bring in new data and capabilities to our Payments Risk Management group, including a cross-company device identification platform and a success-based chargeback management contract that saves the company over $1MM per quarter, net of all costs.

Received Risk & Payments Impact Award in 2016

Principal Risk Strategist

Led a team responsible for managing fraud on the $3.2B Facebook Games platform and other smaller non-Ads payments (Gift Cards, Airmail, Subscriptions) products. With a very small core team, took fraud down to record-low levels on both Games and non-Games while hiring and onboarding several analysts.

Manager, Platform Payment Risk

Led efforts to raise money, set up alliances with key channel partners, and manage the corporate strategy for a large-scale data appliance for Data Scientists. 

We raised over $2MM is financing led by a top-tier VC (Founders Fund Angel), built the product, made initial sales, and successfully exited the company in 2015 via acquisition by Sysorex (now Inpixon, NASD:INPX).

Co-Founder & President

Led a team that was responsible for Risk Strategy in four areas: Point of Sale/Physical Retail, Mobile, Digital Goods, and the PayPal API Platform.  

For Digital Goods and Platform, my team reduced loss for our sellers by customizing solutions; in Mobile and Point-of-Sale, we designed new technical and policy solutions to enable growth while managing exposure to PayPal.

Most significantly, we successfully launched and grew the PayPal Here point-of-sale mobile solution and captured significant share from market-leader Square without significantly increasing PayPal’s losses (growing from $0 to over $4B in processed swipe payments in under a year).

Director, New Ventures Risk Strategy

Led a team focused on setting fraud- and loss-management strategies for buyer-side risks, such as stolen bank accounts, credit cards, and identities.  Managed these risks while still creating a world-class customer experience for buyers and sellers.  Led decline-reduction efforts for Risk, overseeing broad initiatives that ultimately achieved $3.2B+ in annual payment volume improvements for the company.

Shared in PayPalian Award for team with greatest impact in 2010

Received Critical Talent Award for eBay-wide top-tier personal performance

Director, Consumer Risk Management

As a team lead on the Risk Consulting team, my role involved working on strategies for managing cross-business-unit issues with risk/fraud implications.  I delivered incremental payment volume of over $400MM per year with no incremental risk exposure by focusing on optimizing payment decline decisions and related user experiences.

Principal Consultant, Strategy & Special Projects

* Managed a team of 3-5 product managers focused on our rapidly expanding efforts to deliver new financial products, one of the fastest growing and most profitable areas of PayPal's transaction volume (35-40% annual growth, over $1B in additional transaction volume in each of the past two years).
* Personally led the initial strategy, use case development, and specification efforts for the Virtual Debit Card, an innovative product that allows PayPal's safe, easy payments features to be used anywhere on the web - without the merchant's adoption of the PayPal mark

Group Product Manager, Financial Products

Manage a team of five product managers responsible for features in these areas: 

(1) financial services, including the debit card, credit card, money market fund, and buyer credit products
(2) new funding source risk management, critical for rolling out new payment products (i.e., DE ELV)
(3) bank verification, a key vehicle for increasing safety on our site
(4) account takeover prevention, whether the threat comes in the form of phishing, password guesses, or trojans
(5) acceptable use policy compliance

Group Product Manager

* Worked with Risk Management team to implement multiple fraud detection models resulting in over $12MM in annual savings / loss avoidance
* Led anti-spoof /anti-phishing efforts from both a business and product perspective

Senior Product Manager, Fraud & Risk

Building new consumer research team focused on analyzing our user website experience from a data-driven approach while also leading the product and project management effort on one of eHealth's key strategic projects: a novel approach to helping small businesses provide healthcare assistance to their employees (eHealth's BusinessHSA).

Director, Consumer Research

Leading the Product Management and UI Design team at eHealth, Inc.

Director, Product Management

Spearheaded efforts to integrate data billing and mobile commerce capabilities into the market-leading Openwave WAP Gateway (the "MAG", or Mobile Access Gateway); co-authored a patent on carrier-mediated mobile payments

Senior Product Manager, Billing and Commerce

Was one of a handful of early developers on a platform to build trading systems for exotic derivatives (both credit and interest-rate varieties).  Gained understanding of derivative pricing and risk management methodologies and also worked at clients JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch to build trading platforms.

Senior Software Engineer/Consultant

As a summer intern, I was one of three engineers working together to deliver the first Windows-based product at Barra (Alphabuilder).

I am still amazed that three people could code a product that, with data, could sell for $50-100k per year per user... and still does.

My code was still live in 2009 (and may still be today) as the graphing engine for Alphabuilder, a part of the Aegis system that is one of Barra's main products even today - and my graphs are even displayed in their one-sheets on the product!

Software Engineer

Over 20 years of innovating financial services as product leader and payments, risk, and compliance expert

Know about Avery Kadison's work experience, education, bootcamps, certifications, and much more. Avery Kadison