The Margin Wars Avi | Anitha

About Avi and Anitha

Avi

Co-author

Payments product executive with 15+ years across enterprise payments, pricing and FX, and data platforms.

Anitha

Co-author

Payments product executive with 15+ years across enterprise payments, cards and financial infrastructure.

Avi: background

Avi is a payments and product executive with 15+ years across PayPal, VEON and Rand Merchant Bank, in enterprise payments, pricing and data.

Highlights

  • Owns P&L and go-to-market for Braintree (~$1.2T annual TPV), with 45+ PMs and 250+ engineers.
  • Led the platform from deep losses to strong profitability: a billion-dollar transaction-margin swing.
  • With Fiserv and Snowflake, led a zero-copy consolidation of all US PayPal, Venmo and Braintree volume, cutting the merchant SLA from 96 hours to 12 (watch below).
  • Co-inventor on a pending US patent for LLM-orchestrated deal pricing and margin forecasting.

Career

  1. Senior Product Director, Enterprise Platform & ExperiencesPayPal2022-Present
  2. Director, Business Development, Global EnterprisePayPal, UK2019-2022
  3. Global Product Director, PaymentsVEON2017-2019
  4. CIO, Investment Banking DivisionRand Merchant Bank2015-2017
  5. Head of Web & MobileMomentum2013-2015
  6. EarlierFNB South Africa / FirstRand Bank India (2009-2013); Accenture (2007-2009)

Anitha: background

Anitha is a payments and product executive with 15+ years across PayPal, Braintree and Stripe, in enterprise payments, acquiring and partnerships.

Highlights

  • Led product and business strategy for a global acquiring portfolio of more than $1T.
  • Works across the full enterprise payments lifecycle: onboarding, checkout, authorization, pricing and billing, money movement, disputes, fraud, tax, compliance and reconciliation.
  • Has worked with some of the world's largest merchants and marketplaces on authorization, risk and payments infrastructure.
  • Built product teams that bring Engineering, Finance, Legal, Risk, Compliance and Operations together around multi-year strategies.

Career

  1. Director of Product Management, Enterprise PaymentsPayPal2025
  2. Head of Enterprise Acquiring, Product ManagementPayPal2022-2025
  3. Partnership Strategic Operations ManagerStripe2021-2022
  4. Global Payments Partner & Market ManagerBraintree2017-2021
  5. Account Management Team Lead, APACBraintree2016-2017
  6. Account ManagerBraintree2015-2016

Avi's education: BBusSc Finance, University of KwaZulu-Natal; Oxford Saïd Fintech Programme; Duke University Management Development; SingularityU.

I have spent my career on the parts of payments where margin is won or lost:

how a transaction is routed, approved, priced, disputed, converted and settled, at a scale where a few basis points add up to real money.

Avi

Where Avi has spoken

  • Snowflake Summit 2025, San Francisco: keynote co-presenter with Fiserv
  • Money20/20 USA 2024, Las Vegas: merchant cloud data sharing, with Snowflake
  • Fiserv Forum 2024, Las Vegas: "Future is PayFac and GenAI" panel
  • MRC Las Vegas 2024: host, "Marketplaces on the Rise: Payments and Risk"

Watch

Snowflake Summit 2025, San Francisco: keynote co-presenter with Brandy Wood, VP Product, Fiserv. Zero-copy data integration between processor and merchant.
Money20/20 USA: Data Cloud Now interview with Ryan Green on data and AI in payments.

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