Résumé
Robert Pana
Product Manager · Bucharest, Romania
Product manager with nine years of experience building payment, risk, and identity products, with a strong focus on German retail. I lead product strategy and delivery for solutions used by major retail brands, including EDEKA, dm, PAYBACK, and Betty Barclay. My work covers the full commerce lifecycle, from merchant onboarding and identity verification to payment acceptance, credit decisioning, fraud prevention, and transaction monitoring. I turn complex commercial, operational, and regulatory problems into clear roadmaps and reliable products that perform at retail scale. I stay close to customers and engineering, using a deep understanding of payments and risk to improve revenue, conversion, and customer experience.
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