Payments across Southeast Asia
Sole payments PM. Owned methods and checkout across six markets, from the first email guideline to the routing engine underneath.
The problem
A traveler in Vietnam, Thailand, or the Philippines does not pay the way one in Indonesia does. Win checkout in one market with one set of methods and you have solved one sixth of the problem. The crux was building payments that felt local in six countries at once, without six separate stacks.
I was the sole payments PM, and I owned methods and checkout end to end across all six markets, from my first project (a humble revamp of the payment guideline emails) to the routing engine that decided how every transaction settled.
Decisions
Localize the methods, not just the language
Conversion in payments is mostly about whether the method a customer trusts is on the screen. I integrated local acquiring and PSPs per market, Grab Cash-on-Delivery, PayPal, Dragonpay, AirPay, plus virtual accounts, bank transfer, and over-the-counter offline payment, so each country saw the rails it already used. The conversion lift came from method coverage and decline-rate work, not from a prettier button.
Rebuild the routing and config tools so changes took minutes, not tickets
A payment system is only as fast as the team's ability to change it. I rebuilt the internal tools that manage routing and configuration, so adding a method or rerouting a provider stopped being an engineering project. The boring infrastructure is what let the whole portfolio move.
Treat cost as a product surface, not a finance problem
Bank-transfer collections were leaking money on reconciliation. I optimized the unique-code matching to fixed-account matching, and the saving was meaningful. Payments is one of the few product areas where you can move both conversion and cost at the same time.
Outcome
I owned checkout, methods, acquiring relationships, and reconciliation cost across all six of Traveloka's markets. Fraud, risk, and settlement-engine internals sat with separate teams. I was the merchant buying acceptance, and I learned the payments stack from that side of the table.