Notes from the desk: Welcome to The Quarterly Review! It is one of the only media pieces that allow readers to track improvements through time. It’s a chance for the industry to learn about what goes on behind an FI’s four walls and how leadership manages their priorities.
And a review mandates a check-in, as I like to say, so stay tuned to hear all about how the exec turns his ideas into reality.
In this edition we focus on Jeff Pomeroy, SVP, Payments, Services, & Platforms at PayPal.
Executive Summary
Enterprise payments are the engine behind modern commerce. As businesses scale globally, they need payment infrastructure that can keep pace with complexity, volume, and ever-changing merchant demands. PayPal, one of the most recognizable names in payments, is doubling down on its enterprise capabilities to serve the world’s largest merchants.
In today’s story, the spotlight is on a PayPal executive with three decades of payments experience, who shares how the company is unifying its B2B platform across markets, forging partnerships to bring enterprise-grade payments into physical retail, and building value-added services.
The Full Review
[Pomeroy]: When I joined PayPal in 2024, I stepped into a challenge that felt both familiar and fresh. After three decades in payments – from the early days of developing the first consumer e-commerce services in the 90s, to processing payments at scale at Blackhawk, to building issuing and leading the North American product team at Adyen, and creating a brand-new unified cloud-based platform at Fiserv – I knew the opportunity this time was about harnessing PayPal’s tremendous assets and momentum to bring our enterprise payment and service capabilities to full global scale.
PayPal Enterprise Payments (the artist formerly known as Braintree) sits at the center of that effort. We already had incredible technology, deep merchant relationships, and a trusted global brand when I came on board.
My focus has been on unification and intense execution with an end goal of growth: Unifying all of the incredible assets that we have built and acquired, and executing around a few key priorities that reflect our customers’ needs.
The focus: Platform unification and growing value added services and partnership impact
To get there, I’m focused on three core objectives:
- Operate as one unified platform globally: We need to integrate our payments stack across the U.S., Europe, APAC, and Canada, a single integration, one set of APIs, and consistent capabilities for merchants.
- Expand in-store through our partnership with Verifone: This collaboration, which in my view is a best-in-class partnership, allows us to bring PayPal’s enterprise stack directly into physical retail environments. Wherever Verifone has a footprint, which is about half of all global in-store merchants, we can go. By leveraging their existing terminals and software, we can enable in-store payments for merchants in a matter of days rather than months. We’re just getting started in terms of what this partnership can realize for our customers and plan to expand it in the coming months.
- Scale value-added services: We’ve launched a suite of new services, like network tokenization, smart retries, optimized debit routing, and global payout services, that improve authorization rates and reduce costs. These value-added capabilities strengthen our relationships with merchants and create new growth opportunities for PayPal. We plan to double down here in the next six months.
The goals that we’ve set are about building the kind of payments platform large merchants increasingly need: one that works the same way everywhere, handles scale easily, and gives them a clear view of how their business is performing. Moreover, it’s a payments platform that does more than processing payments. Internally, that means moving from strong individual products to a single and unified system that brings everything together for our customers.
This approach makes it simpler for merchants to grow with us. They get one way to connect, one set of tools to manage transactions, and the consistency they expect from a global payments partner. When we deliver that, PayPal becomes a bigger part of how their business runs day to day – not just a payments option, but part of the infrastructure they rely on.
We’ve been quietly building toward this for a while. I always tell my team our North Star is to be the best at what we do, and I think we’re close. If we hit these targets over the next six months, we’ll be in rarefied air and confidently operating at the level of the world’s leading payment providers.
Plan of action
I mentioned our focus on “intense execution”. When I first joined, the priority was clear: win in enterprise payments globally. To do that, we had to change how we execute.
Early on, our teams had no shortage of talent or ambition but needed focus. The organization was juggling too many priorities at once, shifting direction whenever a new deal or idea surfaced. To help solve this, we put up guardrails around the way we work.
Today, every initiative is evaluated through three lenses: merchant demand, ROI, and contractual obligations. That simple discipline has changed everything. It brought clarity to what we build and why we build it and helped us focus our energy where it matters most – on driving performance, efficiency, and merchant satisfaction.
We’ve also doubled down on listening as a core part of execution. A revamped merchant intake function keeps us close to our customers and ensures their feedback directly shapes our roadmap. Each quarter, we review everything we’re doing and reserve the right to pivot if priorities shift. It’s simple, but it’s transformed how we operate. We’re now driven by what’s meaningful, not just what’s new.
The culture driving our progress
It’s hard to describe our culture in a word or phrase, but what I can articulate are the behaviors I try to model, that I’d like to think are helping to drive our progress. One, I roll up my sleeves. I am a product guy at heart. I love the details. I meet teams in the weeds: what are you building, what problems are you seeing? After three decades, I’ve seen a lot – I might have simple suggestions. Many are product leaders on the way up; I hope to motivate them or offer a different lens. More time in the trenches makes me a better leader.
For our teams, that means leaning in one-on-one with our engineering counterparts: what’s in the backlog, what’s deploying?
That’s not to imply a culture of micromanagement. It’s the opposite. I try to create a culture of empowerment. My door is always open, but I don’t want people to come to me for permission. I might offer advice, but they’re fully empowered to make the call. My goal is to remove obstacles, so we can all move faster.
Finally, as we are moving fast, I try not to lose sight of the importance of making space to think. I block time for quiet. I walk. You’ll often find me talking or having coffee with people across campus. It frees me up to think, and it helps me deal with day-to-day pressure by giving me that space to reflect and introspect.
