Ron Lazaro

Lead Product Manager, Enterprise In-Store PIN Debit / Emerging Payments

• Own product strategy and execution for enterprise in-store PIN debit and optimized debit routing, spanning terminal integrations, processing, merchant migrations and coordination with acquiring and network partners.
• Advanced a zero-to-one PIN debit program to EMV certification in under six months, coordinating across Verifone, Fiserv, Pathward and internal engineering and operations teams.
• Directly negotiated the Fiserv contract for the PIN debit program; partner with Analytics to develop payment economics models and business cases, and negotiate network rebates with FIS for NYCE and Culiance.
• Lead a pipeline of 70+ enterprise merchant migrations from legacy in-store payments, supporting program goals of $3B incremental TPV and $35M transaction margin (targets, not realized outcomes).
• Previously led Pay with PayPal on Braintree and emerging payments features across PayPal/Venmo checkout, merchant integrations and processing; advanced Orders V2 migration to approximately 98% of merchants and 96% of transactions at a reported milestone.

Senior Manager, Customer Payments

• Led the Customer Payments organization within Digital Retail, directly managing product and technology team members as part of a 20+ person organization; owned team development, priorities and delivery.
• Owned payment platform strategy and roadmaps for authorization, capture, settlement, refunds, alternative forms of payment and fraud-risk services across multiple sales channels.
• Led an RFP and selection process for a new payment gateway provider, advancing payment data security, flexibility to launch new payment methods, and reduced exposure to cleartext cardholder data.
• Directed integrations with payment providers, acquirers, card networks and cross-functional stakeholders spanning Treasury, Finance, Procurement, Cybersecurity and Operations.
• Led development of a blockchain-based travel credit and eGift card platform; established a 24/7 global support approach to improve operational continuity.

Senior Product Manager, Merchant Payments

• Owned a global enterprise merchant payments domain supporting post-processing and settlement flows across North America, EMEA, Brazil and Australia.
• Set global payments product direction with engineering for roadmap delivery, settlement improvements, incident response and resiliency; coached two associate PMs without formal HR management responsibilities.
• Led changes to funds settlement architecture involving PayPal-controlled FBO accounts to improve flexibility in processing and liquidity management.

Product Manager, Merchant Payments

• Defined product vision and strategy for merchant service and operations platforms supporting global enterprise customers; partnered with engineering on API, data and architecture decisions.
• Delivered customer/operations visibility tools, reporting exception workflows and financial adjustment interfaces, using Tableau, Kafka and AWS-based architecture.
• Established a measurement strategy for onboarding, service, platform and transaction operations, integrating metrics into product requirements and delivery.

Product Manager, APIs & Connected Services

• Defined product vision and roadmaps for API-first data and connected-customer capabilities, collaborating with technology, UX, legal and external platform partners.
• Led API-first connected services and customer platform initiatives, including approximately two years of direct people management at Ford; managed two direct reports and helped mentor other product managers.