Product Manager · Payments Intelligence · Stripe

Maximizing revenue on
every transaction
takes deep domain fluency.

Stripe's Payments Intelligence team optimizes billions of dollars in annual payment volume — reducing fraud, lifting authorization rates, and lowering cost for merchants. That work demands a PM who has shipped these systems, not just studied them.

Submitted by Branden Beardsley — currently Payments Performance Manager at Adyen, advising enterprise merchants on authorization optimization, risk stack performance, and global checkout strategy. Founder, Cellix.ai.

Payments Intelligence · Key metrics
What this role optimizes
ARR driven via auth optimization$15M+ Adyen
Enterprise merchants advised50+ Adyen Uplift
Authorization rate lift+3–5pp direct
Fraud signal rules shipped90+ Paze 0→1
Annual fines prevented$2M+ PayPal
ARR trajectory · Adyen merchant portfolio
$15M+
ARR generated through auth optimization at Adyen
50+
Enterprise merchants advised on Adyen Uplift globally
90+
Fraud rules shipped from zero at Paze
27+
PSP integrations live on Cellix.ai
Role requirements

What the role demands.
Where the evidence is.

Each of Stripe's stated requirements for the PM, Payments Intelligence role — with the specific work that answers it.

Requirement · 8+ years PM experience
Full product lifecycle ownership, from 0 to board-level reporting
At Adyen, owns end-to-end product strategy for enterprise merchants across risk, auth optimization, and competitive positioning — driving $15M+ ARR. At Paze, owned the full fraud product from vendor evaluation to board-level roadmap reporting.
Requirement · Strong business acumen
Revenue impact through payments stack optimization
Generated $15M+ ARR at Adyen and $500K+ ARR at PayPal by diagnosing merchant stack inefficiencies and building clear cost/benefit cases. Advised enterprise risk teams on authorization performance with measurable outcome tracking.
Requirement · Customer & partner facing
C-level enterprise merchant conversations at scale
Currently pitching 50+ enterprise merchants on Adyen Uplift — personalizing global checkout strategies, running competitive A/B tests, and converting C-level risk leaders with data-backed switching narratives. At Paze, delivered product demos that grew the merchant portfolio from zero.
Requirement · Operational savvy
Launched and scaled a 150-person fraud operations site
At Adyen, designed and built a commercial enablement program that trained Account Management teams to independently configure and run competitive A/B tests — operationalizing a specialist function at scale. At Chime, launched a 150+ investigator fraud ops site from pilot, sustaining 95%+ case accuracy.
Requirement · Analytical horsepower
MS in Data Science, applied to fraud ML and forecasting
Master's in Data Science, 4.0 GPA, focused on Applied ML and Agentic Workflow Design. At Adyen, designed controlled A/B tests against competing processors, producing data-backed proof points that won merchant switching decisions. Built dispute forecasting models at Chime that cleared 30% of case backlog in 6 months.
Requirement · Crisp communicator
Board-level reporting and 500-merchant compliance dashboards
Presented weekly strategy and metrics directly to the board at Paze. Built compliance dashboards at PayPal monitoring 500+ merchants, preventing $2M+ in annual card network fines and improving dispute win rates 20–40%.
Case studies

Three Stripe problems.
Already solved elsewhere.

Each case is framed around the challenge Stripe's Payments Intelligence team faces — with the work that demonstrates it's been done before.

Adyen Feb 2025 – Present · Payments Performance Manager
↔ Stripe Authorization Boost · Payments Intelligence

Authorization Boost needs a PM who can translate ML signal improvements into merchant revenue — and run the experiments that prove it.

01

Enterprise merchants with multi-processor stacks demand proof before switching. Adyen's Uplift product — like Stripe's Authorization Boost — only lands if the PM can design rigorous A/B tests against competing processors and turn the results into commercial decisions. This is the current day-to-day at Adyen.

The challenge at Adyen
  • No structured methodology to compare processors
  • Account teams couldn't run tests without specialist support
  • Competitors made unverifiable authorization claims
  • Product adoption stalled without third-party proof points
How it was solved
  • Designed controlled A/B test methodology for head-to-head processor comparison
  • Built commercial enablement so AM teams could run tests independently
  • Created data-driven narratives that won merchant switching decisions
  • Advised 50+ enterprise merchants on global checkout optimization strategies
Why it translates to Stripe
  • Authorization Boost faces the exact same merchant proof-point challenge
  • PM must bridge data science output to merchant-level revenue story
  • Enablement model maps directly to Stripe's Sales + PM dynamic
  • A/B test design is table stakes for Payments Intelligence work
$15M+ARR generated via Protect upsell
50+Enterprise merchants advised on Uplift
30+Household-name brands on Protect
CurrentRole — Feb 2025 to present
📊
The Stripe connection
Authorization Boost's PM role requires someone who can design experiments, interpret ML signal improvements, and turn those results into merchant revenue conversations — at scale, with enterprise merchants, today. That's the current role at Adyen. The methodology, the enablement infrastructure, and the commercial outcomes are directly transferable.
Paze · Early Warning Feb 2024 – Feb 2025 · Sr. Fraud Risk Strategist
↔ Stripe Radar · Fraud Prevention

Radar needs a PM who can build a fraud ML stack from scratch and ship it — not just manage one that exists.

02

Paze launched competing with PayPal and Apple Pay with zero fraud risk infrastructure — no rules, no vendor stack, no ML signals. The challenge was identical to what Stripe faces when standing up a new risk product: build it right, ship it fast, and prove it works in production.

The challenge at Paze
  • Zero fraud infrastructure at launch
  • No vendor relationships or signal stack
  • Board pressure to show risk metrics weekly
  • Auth rates uncompetitive vs incumbents
How it was solved
  • Evaluated & onboarded device intelligence, identity, and fraud signal vendors
  • Authored 90+ signal-layered rules in production
  • Ran systematic tuning cycles to reduce false positives
  • Owned vendor roadmap and reported results to board
Why it translates to Stripe
  • Mirrors Radar's rule authoring and ML signal architecture
  • Same build-test-tune loop as Authorization Boost
  • Identical stakeholder trade-off: risk tolerance vs. auth rate
  • Demonstrates 0→1 payment product ownership
~15%Reduction in false-positive declines
3–5ppAuth rate lift post-engine launch
90+Fraud rules authored and tuned
0→1Full stack built from zero
The Stripe connection
Stripe Radar's PM needs to understand fraud signal architecture, rule authoring trade-offs, and false positive tuning at a level that only comes from having shipped these systems. This work is the direct equivalent — built from scratch, tuned in production, and presented to the board.
PayPal Oct 2021 – Feb 2024 · Enterprise Risk Strategist
↔ Stripe Radar · Dispute Management

Radar's dispute and compliance features need a PM who understands card network rules at the merchant operations level.

03

Card network compliance programs expose merchants to millions in annual fines when dispute rates cross thresholds. Radar's dispute management and Visa CE3.0 features sit in exactly this problem space — and managing 500+ enterprise merchants through it requires operational depth that's rare.

The challenge at PayPal
  • 500+ merchants in Visa/MC compliance risk programs
  • No centralized alerting — issues surfaced reactively
  • Dispute win rates below industry benchmarks
  • Risk tooling adoption low among enterprise accounts
How it was solved
  • Built dashboards and threshold alerting for 500+ merchants
  • Analyzed transaction and chargeback data to surface pain points
  • Translated data findings into fraud tooling recommendations
  • Grew $500K+ ARR by packaging risk tools around merchant outcomes
Why it translates to Stripe
  • Radar's dispute management serves the same compliance challenge
  • Identical workflow: data analysis → product recommendation → merchant ROI
  • Card network rule depth (Visa CE3.0, TC40s) is directly applicable
  • Cellix.ai was built on this experience — now serving 27+ processors
$2M+Annual card network fines prevented
20–40%Improvement in dispute win rates
$500K+New ARR from risk tooling upsell
500+Enterprise merchants managed
🛡
The Stripe connection
Radar's dispute management and Visa CE3.0 features require a PM who has operated in this exact problem space — not just read the spec. Managing 500 merchants through compliance programs, building the tooling that prevented $2M in fines, and then encoding that knowledge into Cellix.ai is the credential.
Proof of concept

The product Stripe's team
would recognize immediately.

Cellix.ai is a live, production AI payment intelligence platform — dispute automation, fraud prevention, and processor optimization across 27+ integrations. It's what happens when a Payments Intelligence PM builds their own version of the problem.

Live production · cellix.ai

AI-Powered Dispute Automation & Payment Intelligence

Automates dispute investigations end-to-end — compiling evidence to Visa CE3.0 and Mastercard specs, submitting via processor APIs, and running fraud prevention across the stack. Built using Claude Code and Anthropic APIs. Stripe integration is live.

See the full story → www.cellix.ai ↗
StripeAdyenPayPal Checkout.comBraintree Visa CE3.0Mastercard ML Fraud ModelsAgentic AI REST APIsWebhooksPCI DSS
Processor integrations live27+
Dispute decision latency50ms
Dispute automation scopeFull lifecycle
Card network specs supportedVisa CE3.0 + MC
InfrastructureClaude Code · Anthropic APIs
Live site www.cellix.ai ↗
Capability map

What the Payments Intelligence
PM role requires — and where it's been built.

Each competency Stripe's job description calls for, mapped to the direct experience that covers it.

Authorization Rate OptimizationAdyen (current) · Paze
Enterprise Merchant StrategyAdyen ($15M ARR) · PayPal
Fraud ML & Signal ArchitectureAdyen · Paze (0→1) · Cellix.ai
Payment Product OwnershipAdyen · Paze · Cellix.ai
Applied ML & Data ScienceAdyen A/B testing · MS Data Science 4.0
Cross-functional ExecutionAdyen AM enablement · Paze board reporting