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Varsha Shah

 

 


Varsha Shah - Bay Area, California

LinkedIn Blog

Summary:  

Highly accomplished product leader with a track record of delivering world class crypto and payments experiences for 400M+ PayPal customers.

Globally leading dynamic teams, my expertise spans product lifecycle, competitor analysis, and agile methodologies.

A visionary in product strategy, driving seamless, customer centric UX with AI/ML, Gen AI integration within reusable platforms.

My engineering background empowers me to tackle tech challenges, tailor requirements, and innovate for smoother engineering execution. Thriving at building trusted connections, I expedite buy-in for roadmap success to launch complex initiatives without compromising product quality and security on tight deadlines.

Experience:

PayPal                                                                                                                                             2012 till date                                                                                                                                

Principal Product Manager - Crypto Risk - Protecting $1B+ PayPal crypto assets from fraud and scam.

PYUSD stablecoin, Crypto Trades, Transfer, Pay with Crypto, Fiat On/Off Rails

  •  Spearheading  go to market collaborations with crypto, legal, compliance, data science  teams.

  • Integrate real-time risk assessments with UX, AI / ML to reduce fraud loss, authenticate identity at signup and transaction.

  • $50M+ in benefits and 25% reduction in call volume delivered by launching risk controls for fraud management like fiat holds, asset holds, account restriction and verification. Create PRD’s, jira, roadmaps, lead scrum of 10+ cross functional global  teams Embedded risk and payment controls enabling low loss bps while growing the market cap of PYUSD stablecoin to $300MM

  • Gen AI LLM for  scam claims intake disputes handling for automated categorization, claims dismissal and queuing.

  • Utilize chatGPT, Kaiber.ai ,Pictory.ai's AI storytelling to craft compelling executive presentations, to get funding. 


Group Risk Product Manager -  $91B+ portfolio p2p, instant transfers, top-ups, savings, donations.

  • Promoted for outstanding customer centric product vision and execution. 

  • Mentoring and coaching a dynamic team of 6 Product Managers supporting 40+ quarterly releases. 

  • Partner with business and strategy teams to build roadmaps to exceed 200MM in loss and revenue KPIs.

  • Embracing data driven culture and experimentation, team launching 10+ experiments/month. 


Lead Payments  Product Manager - Card, Bank Refunds, Instant Withdrawals OCT, RTP, Open Banking, Tokenization

  • Delivered roadmaps with 100MM incremental revenue byoptimizing authorization rates for transactions via tokenization, smart auth, models.

  • Product experience upgrades  for  verification  of identity , bank and card ownership  - via open banking ,3DS

  • Overachieved $1B Revenue target for scaling instant bank transfers with low loss.

  • Preventing $10MM annual network fines protected 20M+ SMB, nonprofits, from carding attacks.


Global Merchant Services –Partners, Marketplace & PSP 

  • Deliver risk consultation to internal and external clients, fostering trust with top 50, 100M+ portfolio partners like Google, and Microsoft.

  • Discovery with external partners to drive design,documentation and security of embedded partner api integrations.

  • Collaborating with Professional Services for feature requests to roadmap, enhance api’s and establish risk integration guidelines.


  AI/ML Device intelligence and Identity product delivering $40M annually in fraud reduction. 

  • Implemented AI/ML detection of bot automation device/account takeovers, used in ATO & trust models.

  • It was powered by a 1B+ gathered device identities and associated behavioral biometrics through mobile app sdk and browser fingerprinting JavaScript.


Innovative solutions incorporating AI/ML ðŸ¤–

Customer Targeting:

  • Crypto Propensity & Rewards Models: Predict and target receptive customers for crypto products.

Customer Complaints Analysis

  • Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis of complaints from Facebook and Twitter feeds.

  • Identify and prioritize influencer accounts for complaint handling 

Merchant/Seller:

  • Website crawler:  Detect shell websites  &  verify  true industry of the business merchant claimed at signup  

  • Carding attack and bot attack detection on merchant sites

Fraud Detection:

  • Scam LLM & Spam NLP Models: Identify scams (Merchandise, Romance) and phishing attempts via invoices.

  • Synthetic Identity Detection: Spot instances of shared SSNs across accounts & assets , indicating potential fraud.

Authentication & Fraud Prevention:

  • Graph-Based Authentication & Carding Detection: Prevent fraudulent activity.

  • Risk Score sharing  with issuers for better auth rates. & 

  • StandIn Model:Pay on behalf of trusted customer  for when credit card networks is down and recoup later

Trust & Security:

  • Trust Model & Explainable AI: Zero declines, instant refunds for trusted customers & explain risk declines to customers.

  • Open Banking: Confirm bank ownership, provide smart representations for NSF recovery, provide credit

  • Device Browser Fingerprinting: Identify fraudulent through behavioral biometrics via  keystroke and mouse movement, bot detection,  remote desktop, vpn detection, voip detection

 Compliance:

  • Synthetic identity detection of SSNs shared across distinct accounts, email, and phone assets.

  • News crawler for identifying money laundering and terrorist financing activity.

Crypto 

  • Projects

    • Buy/ Sell Hold Crypto (BTC, ETH LTC) - PayPal Venmo
    • Crypto 3rd Party Transfers and Deposits - PayPal Venmo
    • Crypto internal p2p transfers PayPal users, Venmo users and interoperability
    • Asset Holds, restrictions , Blocklists
    • PYUSD Stablecoin Launch
    • GeoExpansion to UK, LUX, ES and more
    • Fiat On/Off Ramp Integrations with Metamask, Jaguar, Phanthom
    • Celsius Payouts
    • Remittances using PYUSD
  • Post

Compliance Scam/Spam – P2P, Crypto, Invoicing - mitigate $50MM+ scam claims loss.🔎

  • Teamed up with regulatory, and legal departments to craft a flexible plug-and-play multi product scam strategy compliant with PSR/OFA in the UK, CFPB in the US and MAS jurisdictions. 

  • Collaborate with cross functions to finalize PRD’s, platform architecture, roadmap, delivery timelines and lead a scrum of 7+ teams globally.

  • Deploy advanced AI/ML scam models and strategy for targeted scam warning and educational UX to vulnerable and risky segments without impacting product conversion KPI’s.

  • Gen AI based scam claims intake disputes handling for automated categorization, claims dismissal and queuing.

  • Use ChatGPT for market research, capability comparison across Intuit and stripe to devise product strategy and controls to mitigate Invoicing spam originating from the platform, with market parity.


Compliance - CIP/KYC/KYB, Privacy

  • Pursuing ACAMS certification - expected completion July ‘24

  • Led global implementation of Compliance Platform, UX and policy for consumer and business CIP/KYC and EDD across 50 countries under the MAS jurisdiction to meet regulatory deadline to stay in business.

  • GDPR -Collaborated with BDO Compliance, data teams to develop privacy solutions for data segregation, anonymization, partitioning, Open banking, 3DS CIT/MIT, exemption strategies.

  • Facilitated seamless data intelligence sharing between risk and global investigations platforms.

  • Data and Geo fenced deployment of risk infrastructure, models, and strategy deployment to comply with PBOC regulation in China and RBI regulation in India


Product Research

  • Crypto and Stablecoin Whitepapers
  • Crypto Fraud Coinbase fraud incidents
  • Market Analysis: Conducted competitive analyses for Square, Google Checkout, and Amazon versus PayPal Express Checkout. Researched customer insights with taxi drivers and Square Merchants to build product strategy and needs.
  • E-commerce Platform Launch: Launched Magento, OsCommerce, ZenCart, Shopify, and Miva carts for comparative analysis and market penetration.
  • White Paper Development: Authored a white paper on PayPal Kiosk, detailing hardware specifications, device integrations, and use cases, addressing store clerk needs and ensuring security.
  • Tablet Onboarding Solution: Spearheaded a tablet onboarding solution sign-ups in malls and Home Depots. Design UX/UI, Marketing content Integrated with PayPal APIs and provided analytics for signup optimization, enhancing customer acquisition and engagement.
  • APAC Partner Onboarding: Directed partner onboarding efforts for PayPal Here merchants in Japan, achieving an 11X reduction in sign-up time through innovative solutions. Conducted extensive research and user journey mapping in Softbank stores in Tokyo to identify customer needs and optimize and launch onboarding experience



Innovation

  • Social entrepreneurship -Won 1st place in the  Opportunity Hack hackathon Conceptualized and launched WasteNoFood, a multi-platform app for food donations, resulting in 3 million meals donated. Successfully secured adoption by prominent venues like Levi's Stadium and San Francisco Airport, diverting 20 tons of food to feed the needy. Conducted surveys at soup kitchens and Second Harvest Food Bank to understand customer demographics, segments, and needs, informing product development and marketing strategies.

  • Winner of  Data Science hackathon built a Twitter bot to ask merchant customer support on the payment options they offer to gather data on which PayPal merchants offer ApplePay as an option too 


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