Ria Financial Portfolio

• Drove requirements and strategic planning with executive management for major overhaul and launch of new public money transfer website. Includes deriving feature sets / product backlog and overseeing versioning of products as to prioritize features and determine what will be included in future releases.
• Filled 11 full-time positions for technology and product development team by creating job descriptions, negotiating salaries / benefits, formulating offer letters and working directly with internal and external recruiters for finding candidates, scheduling interviews, conducting phone screens and onsite interviews in CA and CO. In addition, worked on the staffing efforts of other Digital teams by contributing to job descriptions and assessing skillsets of potential candidates in interviews.
• In conjunction with Corporate IT, established a working relationship with external security firm Deloitte to conduct penetration tests on three of Ria’s largest publicly-facing web applications including POS used by agents worldwide. Responsibilities included providing test data for establishing baseline and reduced assessment time, immediately responding to vulnerabilities discovered during assessment phase by analyzing scope and severity of breach and holding seminar with developers on how to remediate and prevent future exploits. Due to successful collaboration, Deloitte has been selected and engaged to work on future security assessments for Digital.

• Successfully implemented new payment option PIN debit to current website. Includes working directly with 3rd party provider to identify deficiencies in out of box product offerings, defining technical requirements to adhere to PCI compliances and eventually having them produce a new product for Ria’s needs. Efforts also include working with Corporate IT team to establish new payment provider configuration settings in back-end processes and internal Product team to define pricing structure and user interface specific to PIN debit in order to provide customers with a lower cost for their transactions.
• Worked directly with Digital Marketing team to establish strategically designed landing web pages for specific corridors on current website. Includes providing technical assessment on defining SEO-friendly URLs, specific HTML markup and meta data in order to provide new development team member with guidelines for creating the new web pages within current site seamlessly and efficiently.

• Established initial Google Analytics reporting suite and successfully transitioned ownership to Digital Operations team. Defined development changes required in order to obtain web analytics site-wide in order to achieve comprehensive measurement planning including audience characteristics with behavior, platform identification, conversions with goals, event tracking and more across key functions of the site, from registration to order placement.
• Worked directly with Corporate IT team to establish back-end architecture in order to support ability to store multiple identity verification and payment providers in a highly configurable manner for Digital applications to consume.
• Assisted Digital Operations team members in defining key areas of web application where 3rd party scripts can reside in order to collect tracking data effectively.
• Worked directly with Digital Product and Operation teams in performing a detailed CMS vendor comparison in order to select the best platform for Digital’s single web presence initiative. Includes participating in detailed vendor discussions to determine technology usage, API extensibility, infrastructure hosting in a cloud environment and more. After CMS was selected, facilitated the software management between internal Product and Operations teams along with 3rd party vendor in order to gracefully develop, test and promote changes across multiple environments.
• Participated in initial Digital Operations and Corporate IT DBA meetings to elicit initial requirements for establishing Data Warehouse that will serve as platform for Ria Digital’s data strategy. Includes technology considerations and constant communications defining current data repository across the enterprise.

Oversaw development of modifications made to support zero fee implementation. Includes writing complex SQL statements to query test and production pricing data and compile into spreadsheets in order to view pricing across all payment methods and corridors in an easy manner due to lack of interface in corporate systems.

• Drove first Ria Digital white label integration with Boost Mobile’s mobile wallet app for Android and iOS, allowing their customers to use Ria’s cash-based services to send money worldwide, pay bills, top-up pre-paid wireless accounts and transfer funds (P2P) from their smartphones. With a successful integration resulting in YoY growth of 985%, expanded Ria’s service by integrating into Sprint’s Money Express mobile wallet.
• Worked in-conjunction with Risk and Product teams to define country expansion and co-branded partner sites vision for Ria Digital. Assessments included evaluating new KYC and payment providers, extending cloud footprint, ability to customize website to meet country-specific legal and compliance requirements, localization and ability to skin partner site. Outcome of assessment led Digital to expand in Spain which is currently under development while Walmart changed their digital integration efforts to 2015. Other 3rd party indirect distribution efforts were made with T-mobile and American Express with their mobile wallets and defining a widget-as-a-service vision for simpler integrations with 3rd parties.

Successfully worked with Digital and Corporate teams to transition from RiaMoneyTransfer.com v1.0 and launch RiaMoneyTransfer v2.0 with web services. Efforts include thoroughly analyzing dependencies, formulating rollback plan, migrating data and more. After launch, oversaw technical direction of several enhancements even though new team was formed to handle some of these deliverables including:

• Increased the accuracy of transfer statuses in Track-a-Transfer feature for transactions placed through Digital, Brick & Mortar and Walmart channels by mapping internal status codes with consumer-friendly content.
• Procured database requirements for querying detailed agent location attributes, allowing customers to see agent data never displayed online before including hours of operation, services offered and more.
• Working directly with Corporate team to implement first iteration of Early ACH program where repeat customers can have their ACH transaction expedited based on rules defined by the Digital Risk team.
• Took part with Risk team in evaluating vendors to replace CyberSouce decision system. After selection, oversaw technical implementation of Accertify including deprecating dependencies outside of Digital and replacing with new features that reduce decision processing time.
• Oversaw development of new developer portal dev.riamoneytransfer.com by identifying component that expedites documentation process and defined levels of documentation that assists developers the most in their integration efforts.
• Worked with PMO team to transition away from Corporate system and implement new time-tracking feature in Digital TFS instance, allowing developers to easily enter their hours along with their work tasks, giving PMO team the ability to generate capitalization reports that adhere to corporate requirements.

Oversaw technical implementation of new fraud detection provider, iOvation that identifies potentially malicious devices and prevents further action on their part, reducing fraudulent transactions from being placed and costs associated with these. Also continuously reviewed & monitored live transactions going through 3rd party payment gateway to ensure $0 dollar authorization implementation succeeded without affecting customers or making unnecessary authorization requests while still adhering to tokenization process, resulting in reduced payment processing costs.