Verifi was the deliberate move out of the PayPal bubble. Hybrid Director of Product role: Bay Area home base, flying to LA every other week. Verifi was the industry leader in Chargeback Management — and the mandate was to grow the platform side and tie three other product lines into the chargeback flywheel.
A white-labeled extension of NMI. Owned end-to-end. The conversion target for merchants who arrived through the chargeback door.
Verifi's proprietary toolset that leveraged multiple specialized vendors to help merchants make smarter processing decisions. Owned roadmap and vendor relationships.
Helped merchants recover revenue from failed payments. Cash-generative, with a vendor-dependency profile that wouldn't age well.
Merchants came in with a chargeback issue → adopted Chargeback Management → converted to Payment Platform → which itself helped mitigate the chargeback issue that brought them in. Three product lines tied tightly to the CB anchor — every conversion strengthened the next one.
Built an automatic Account Updater solution that quietly took over what Decline Salvage had been doing — reducing failure rates upstream rather than recovering lost revenue downstream. Made the call to deprecate Decline Salvage rather than keep optimizing it. Cleaner architecture, less vendor sprawl, more defensible foundation.
Reduced waste, drove platform efficiency, owned the team and built the foundations.
Re-platformed core systems for scale and defensibility. Cut fraud losses ~50% and risk exposure 20%. Built the team and foundations that became part of what made the Visa acquisition story land.
Getting out of the bubble matters. Five years inside a single operating model teaches depth; stepping out into a different scale and shape teaches range. The flywheel between three products was visible only because I'd seen what worked elsewhere — and the call to deprecate a cash-generative product (Decline Salvage) rather than keep optimizing it required the kind of portfolio judgment that an in-the-bubble view rarely sees.