Work
A selection of product initiatives across my career — from fintech infrastructure at Cross River to global platforms and humanitarian technology at Mastercard.
Cross River Bank
VP, Product — Cards
Advanced Authorization
Card authorization sits at the core of any issuing program, and we identified a meaningful opportunity: enable fintech partners to participate directly in real-time transaction decisions while Cross River maintains compliance and risk oversight. I led the product design for this capability, which offers two modes — Direct, where partners make real-time approval decisions on every transaction, and Assist, where Cross River handles routine approvals and escalates to partners only when additional context is needed.
I designed the partner participation model, authored the PRD, and coordinated across engineering, compliance, and the first partner implementation. The model was built to be flexible across partner types and verticals — so the architecture we established for the initial partner extends to subsequent ones with minimal rework. Documentation for the capability is published in Cross River’s developer portal.
Off-Platform Prepaid Issuing
We identified an opportunity to support partner programs that operate with a processor maintaining its own ledger and participating in authorization — while Cross River holds FBO accounts for compliance. This structure opens the door to a broader range of issuing models and expands the types of programs we can bring to market together.
I led the product design for a prepaid issuing capability that accommodates this structure. The goal was to unlock programs that were previously out of scope — and to design the solution cleanly enough that it could travel to other use cases as we grew.
Card Operations & Support Function
I redesigned the card operations model in close collaboration with Cross River’s Customer Success team and our Relationship Management team, ensuring the model was built around the needs of our Tier 1 clients. I liaised with clients directly to understand their expectations and pain points, then translated those insights into operational workflows and support structures that worked for everyone involved.
I became adept at working across our customer support toolset — ServiceNow, Jira, and Zendesk — and used that fluency to design the flows, forms, and escalation paths that structured the function. I also built the integration between our support intake process and the internal feature development pipeline, ensuring that partner feedback informed the product roadmap. I used AI tools throughout — for documentation, training materials, and the knowledge base itself.
Mastercard
Global & Regional Product Leadership · 10+ years
Mastercard Aid Network
In 2014, I started from a question: could Mastercard build something meaningful for humanitarian organizations distributing aid in crisis zones? These were environments with no internet, no banking infrastructure, and beneficiaries who had never held a payment card. The product had to work offline, had to be deployable in two weeks, and had to be simple enough for users with extremely low literacy.
I built it. Field research in the Middle East and Africa. Product requirements developed from immersion sessions with NGO staff. Technical requirements built with engineering. Legal and regulatory approval obtained. Pilot programs launched in Yemen and the Philippines — working with Save the Children, World Vision, and the International Rescue Committee.
It launched commercially six months after the first pilot. It became Mastercard’s first revenue-generating product for this segment and an early foundation for what later became the Community Pass platform. Watch the story on YouTube.
Recognition
- 🏆 PayAwards — Change Agent of the Year, 2016
- 🌍 Fortune — #7 Companies Changing the World
- 🥇 PYMNTS — Best POS Innovation, Gold
- 📡 ITU Telecom World — Award for Disaster Recovery & Prevention
Commerce Pass
A micro-commerce platform supporting small merchants and financial inclusion programs. The existing system was on-premises and not built to scale — the work was to re-platform it to cloud infrastructure while delivering new functionality that key clients needed.
I defined the product requirements, coordinated between core platform and vertical product teams, oversaw UAT, and managed client onboarding to the new version. The new cloud architecture enabled deployments in markets that the previous system couldn’t reach.
Community Pass — Developer Integration Program
Community Pass needed third-party developers to build on top of it. That meant defining how they would access the platform, what support they’d get, and what the onboarding experience looked like — none of which existed yet.
I conducted gap analysis, created the sandbox environment requirements, developed the partnership framework, and helped establish the process for assessing and prioritizing technology partners. The program powered integrations with partners operating across Africa and emerging markets.