Robert Pana
Product Manager · Bucharest, Romania
I write about systems thinking, craft, and the intersection of product and engineering on my blog.
Nine years in payments and fraud, from operations through risk to product management, with a bias towards revenue. I know how money moves end to end, from authorization through settlement to risk and compliance, and I use that to find revenue others miss. I write code, build tools, and think in systems. Most PMs talk to engineers while I think like one, and I stick close enough to the work to know why things break, not just that they did.
Experience
Bucharest, Romania
Product Manager
Nov 2024 - Present- Own and build Verifone Identity, a KYC automation platform originally scoped internally that now automates nearly 2,000 merchant onboardings monthly, replacing a manual process that required dedicated ops headcount, and entering early go-to-market as a standalone product;
- Led the rebuild of Paymorrow's risk engine, replacing hardcoded rules with a configurable system that cut rule deployment time from biweekly release cycles to under two hours, enabling the risk team to respond to fraud patterns in near real-time;
- Redesigned merchant onboarding for Paymorrow around automation, cutting activation from hours to under five minutes and measurably accelerating time-to-first-transaction for new merchants;
- Own acquiring product work and scheme compliance, with a practical understanding of authorization flows and settlement built from years on the processing side;
- Bridge risk, compliance, and engineering across both products, turning domain knowledge from the previous risk lead role into faster product decisions.
Risk Lead
May 2023 - Nov 2024- Owned fraud and credit risk strategy for Paymorrow, Verifone's buy now pay later product, managing rule sets across clients such as Edeka.de and Payback.de;
- Tuned acceptance and decline logic to balance loss exposure against conversion, working to directly impact approval rates while keeping fraud losses within target thresholds;
- Worked hands-on with engineering to rebuild the risk pipeline, cutting decision response times from 1500ms to under 800ms and improving rule execution reliability;
- Expanded scope to include acquiring risk checks and post-transaction monitoring for merchant of record, owning both from strategy through execution.
Bucharest, Romania
Payments Product SME
Mar 2018 - May 2023- Led payment flow changes that reduced fraud rates by a quarter over a year, while improving authorization reliability, achieved by directly adjusting risk logic;
- Operated as de facto owner for payment processing and fraud by writing specs, owning priorities, and driving flow redesigns without the formal title;
- Managed a team of 10-15 fraud and payment operations analysts across shifts, building escalation workflows that became standard operating procedure;
- Became the primary bridge between operations, risk, and engineering, worked to translate domain patterns into product requirements, resulting in shortened iteration cycles.
Payments Product Operations Specialist
Nov 2016 - Mar 2018- Investigated payment anomalies and fraud patterns across processing channels, cutting chargeback rates from 3% to 1.8% by targeting account takeover attacks with better detection rules and escalation workflows;
- Built transaction health and fraud trend reporting that became a standard input for risk decisions across multiple teams.
Expertise
Domain
Transaction Lifecycle OptimizationConversion & Revenue Impact AnalysisMerchant Activation & Time-to-RevenueRisk-to-Revenue BalancingGo-to-Market for PaymentsPricing & Interchange Strategy
Payments
Payments ProcessingAcquiringAlternative and Local Payment MethodsSettlement & ReconciliationMerchant OnboardingPayment OrchestrationScheme TokenizationInterchange PricingSEPA
Risk, Fraud & Compliance
Fraud DetectionKYC AutomationChargeback ManagementScheme CompliancePCI DSSAMLRisk ScoringVelocity ChecksDevice FingerprintingDocument Processing with LLMsSEPA Verification (AIS, Penny Drop)
Technical
TypeScript / React / Next.jsPythonSQL / PostgreSQLRedisGitREST APIs / WebhooksPayment Gateway IntegrationETL / Data PipelinesLLM Integration (Anthropic API)