Jim Vernot

Head of business controls for the Merchant Experiences & Payments Solutions (MEPS) business that encompassed ~10 portfolios. Led a team of risk managers to maintain a strong and sustainable control environment across multiple functional areas of the enterprise.

• This included overseeing the day-to-day management, control, and remediation of Issues and Incidents, Product Governance, Risk Assessments, Business Continuity and Examination Management of impacted portfolios (internal and external). In addition, led the MEPS product organization through a multi-year risk transformation/adoption initiative.

Established and scaled a highly-valued eight-member Marketing First Line of Defense (FLOD) organization to protect the PayPal brand and customer experience while mitigating financial and regulatory risk. Forged strong partnerships across the enterprise to open forthright dialogue and accelerate solutions to diverse business challenges and opportunities across PayPal Core, Consumer Credit, Business Finance, Venmo, Xoom, and ancillary products. Managed all compliance activities.

Risk Management:
• Significantly reduced risk by addressing audit-identified deficiencies, implementing changes and controls, and collaborating on remediation plans, regulatory change implementations, and health of the business insights. All subsequent marketing audits post FLOD establishment met or exceeded rating expectations.
• Led Resiliency, Incident, and Issues Management (RIIM), ensuring adherence to enterprise policy, including business impact and continuity planning.

Operational Excellence:
• Reduced documentation procedures by 50%, partnering with functional business owners to develop, document, test, and align procedures and controls to simplify documentation while enhancing consistency and clarity.
• Built a dedicated five-member Quality Assurance Team to oversee pre- and post-validation of 1100+ annual Marketing campaigns across email, onsite and direct mail channels reducing incident frequency and remediation by ~80%.

Innovation:
• Designed and led development of 10+ Quickbase applications, from governance to execution workflows, that drove efficiency, traceability, scalability, and effective record retention across 500 users.
• Enabled “always-on” dashboards of pipeline, quality, and compliance by establishing monitoring, reporting, and trigger notifications supporting control and execution.

• Built cross-functional partnerships to align key stakeholders on strategic and tactical initiatives
• Implemented critical processes and routines within the Credit Control environment that fundamentally changed the way Credit goes about socializing, driving resolution and executing
• Implemented a repeatable governance framework that promotes cross functional transparency into credit initiatives by including stakeholders upfront and reinforcing continuous engagement
• Established a centralized issues management intake and triage process for control and standardization, clear / complete management reporting, and prioritization aligned to the overall credit business vision.

• Owned the product responsibilities of the PayPal and eBay MasterCard portfolio
• This included ensuring balancing the product and relationship work with our third-party partner Synchrony and the needs of the PayPal credit (legacy Bill Me Later) product
• Oversaw a significant brand change impacting three large web domains across 3 corporate entities
• Identified customer pain points impacting experience and KPI's
• Collaborated and negotiated with impacted product and engineering teams to alleviate subpar customer experience gaps.

Steered marketing initiatives and program execution across channels, building partnerships with channel stakeholders, agencies, line of business, and marketing teams to foster collaboration that accelerated results. Co-developed and established business processes.

Influenced debit reward product direction, decision-making, new product development, and co-brand partnerships through research, evaluation, and recommendations to senior management as a subject matter expert (SME) in rewards operations, including set-up through fulfillment, marketing, and program P&L levers.

Drove brand awareness, identified and prioritized product features, and managed expenses for rewards product. Managed relationships with eight vendors, co-brand partners, and small business product management organization.

• Includes Online Servicing + Marketing, Personnel Operations, Insurance Services