Résumé
Robert Pana
Product Manager · Bucharest, Romania
Nine years in payments and fraud, from operations through risk to product, with a bias toward revenue. I move comfortably across both financial and non-financial products, and I know how money moves end to end, from authorization through settlement to risk and compliance, which I use to find revenue others miss. I write code, build my own tools, and work fluently with LLMs despite not being an engineer. Most PMs talk to engineers; I think like one, and I stay close enough to the work to know why things break, not just when.
Experience
Bucharest, Romania
Product Manager
Nov 2024 - Present- Lead product for Paymorrow, a regulated buy now pay later product with embeddable functionality, and for Verifone Identity, an automation platform focused on eliminating manual KYC work, moving daily between financial and non-financial product lines;
- Grow Verifone Identity from an internal tool into a standalone product, automating nearly 2,000 business onboardings per month, and guide its early go-to-market as a commercial offering;
- Design and build LLM-based document processing for onboarding: multimodal extraction of identity and business data that clears roughly 70% of cases with no manual review, reducing verification from hours to under one minute;
- Manage the BNPL product roadmap and its engineering team directly, currently leading the rollout of Girocard, Germany's most widely used debit scheme, where a partnership with EKS positions Verifone as the only processor offering it at launch;
- Own the transaction risk engine for Paymorrow, rebuilt from hardcoded rules into a configurable system that reduced fraud rule deployment from biweekly releases to under two hours, enabling same-day response to emerging fraud patterns;
- Own product delivery for major German retail and loyalty clients, including EDEKA, dm, and PAYBACK;
Risk Lead
May 2023 - Nov 2024- Owned fraud and credit risk strategy for Paymorrow, Verifone's buy now pay later product, running decision rule sets;
- Tuned acceptance and decline logic to balance loss exposure against conversion, raising approval rates while keeping fraud losses within target thresholds;
- Rebuilt the risk decision pipeline hands-on with engineering, cutting response times from 1500ms to under 800ms in the checkout path and improving rule execution reliability;
- Expanded the role's scope beyond BNPL to acquiring risk and post-transaction monitoring, 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, translating domain patterns into product requirements and shortening 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
Product Management
Product Strategy & RoadmappingAPI & Platform ProductsProduct Discovery & UXGo-to-Market & CommercializationCross-Functional Delivery
Payments
Acquiring & ProcessingSettlement & ReconciliationPayment OrchestrationBNPL & Credit ProductsPayment APIs, Tokenization & Stored CredentialsEuropean Local Payment Methods & SEPA3DS Authentication & Open Banking (AIS / PIS)Interchange & Pricing
Risk & Compliance
Fraud Detection & Risk ScoringCredit DecisioningAcquiring Risk & Transaction MonitoringChargeback ManagementKYC / AMLCard Scheme Compliance & PCI DSS
Agentic Systems
Agentic Workflow DesignAgentic CommerceMCP IntegrationHuman-in-the-Loop ControlsDelegated AuthorityStateful OrchestrationAgent EvaluationAuditability
AI & Engineering
LLM Integration (commercial & open-weight)Multimodal Document ProcessingModel EvaluationAPI & Data ModelingCloud & Serverless ArchitecturePython / SQL / TypeScript
I write about systems thinking, craft, and the intersection of product and engineering on my blog.