Ambar Pansari Product Director, Finix Payments

Company

Finix’s goal is to flatten the world by developing a next generation payments and banking platform that enables real-time payments anywhere, anytime. With Finix, software companies are transforming payments from a historical cost-center into a profit center. Powered by an API-driven architecture and suite of workflow tools, Finix’s Payments-Platform-as-a-service enables companies to manage the entire payments lifecycle by automating compliance requirements, unifying disparate legacy systems and streamlining back-office operations — cutting 2 years of development down to 2 months and reducing ongoing operating costs.

Search Background

Having raised $17.5M Series A from Bain Capital Ventures (Matt Harris), Homebrew (Satya Patel), Insight Partners (Jeff Liberman; Midas List), Aspect Ventures (Theresia Gouw; Midas List) and Visa, Finix were looking to hire their first VP Product. They would be required to take responsibility for leading and shaping a product function capable of delivering the ambitious vision of CEO Richie Serna.

Requirements

As the company’s first product leader, the first requirement is professionalizing the way in which product is run internally. They will work closely with the VP Engineering to grow four dedicated agile teams, each dedicated to the core external facing end-user APIs and Workflow tools: Underwriting & Onboarding; Risk & Fraud; Reporting & Analytics; and Core Payment Processing. As such, the search needed to jointly map great “hands-on” product process originators with strong financial services understanding.

Result

Erevena spoke to over 150 Product leaders over the course of the search and introduced 13 for interview. Ambar Pansari was hired into the role of Product Director and brings more than twenty years of world-class Product Management experience from companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, Bird and Google, where he helped build scalable, reliable global systems.