In this edition we will spotlight Jeff Pomeroy, SVP, Enterprise Payments & PSP Platform.
Executive Summary
Six months after setting an ambitious agenda that included unifying PayPal’s global platform, expanding in-store, and scaling value-added services, Jeff Pomeroy is back on The Quarterly Review with progress to show on all three.
He also plants a flag on a newly broadened mandate: one platform for every business, every channel, and every payment modality — future-proofed with crypto and agentic commerce. And he shares his read on trends worth watching, including where he thinks the next durable moat in payments will be built, and what he’s doing to build it.
“When we last spoke, I framed our work around one idea: intense focus,” Pomeroy said. “Now I’m coming up for air to tell you about it.”
Here is what Pomeroy and his team have accomplished since our last conversation:
- Made value-added services like network tokenization self-serve, converting nearly all free-trial merchants to paying customers.
- Closed a string of omni-channel deals via Verifone, including PayPal’s first government contract.
- Brought Australia and Europe fully onto PayPal’s unified platform and began moving processing in-house.
- Broadened his remit into a new org, Payment Services & Crypto, unifying enterprise, small-business, crypto, and agentic commerce.
The Full Review
A few quarters ago, Pomeroy set three priorities for PayPal’s enterprise payments business: a unified global platform, in-store expansion via Verifone, and scaled value-added services. Six months later, he’s back with what he calls a clean sweep.
“The short version is that we stayed the course,” Pomeroy said. “This is an industry that produces a new shiny object every week, and most of the discipline is in not chasing it.”
That discipline came from guardrails he’d put in place, measuring every initiative against merchant demand, ROI, and contractual obligations.
“That discipline is showing up exactly where it should,” he said, “in the deals we’re closing, the services merchants are turning on, and how we’re executing in the public market.”
Objective 01: Scaling value-added services
Six months ago, the goal was to scale value-added services — network tokenization, smart retries, debit routing, and payouts. Pomeroy says that work has moved from launch to self-serve: merchants can now go into their portal, look at their own reporting, and switch on some of PayPal’s most meaningful services themselves.
“That’s a different business than the one we had a year ago,” he said.
The bigger challenge, he says, was getting merchants to understand what they’re worth. So his team built a proof mechanism that turns on network tokens for free and lets merchants watch what it does to their own numbers.
“We did exactly that with hundreds of merchants recently, and all but one kept the tokens on at the end of the trial,” he said, “because once they could see the value it returned to their payments experience, the decision made itself.”
His team built tooling that surfaces a merchant’s own performance data such as auth rates and costs. “That lets us walk in with the merchant’s own performance in front of us and have a real conversation instead of a sales pitch,” he said.
The team’s speed comes from process restructuring and optimization. PayPal has leaned into AI internally to reduce time-to-live for products, freeing teams to focus their judgment on the parts of a payments problem that actually need a human who understands how the rails behave.
“AI doesn’t replace that,” he said. “It clears the runway so we get to it faster.”
Objective 02: Winning in-store and omni-channel
The Verifone partnership remains, in Pomeroy’s words, the spine of PayPal’s move into physical retail, and he says the deals are coming through. His team has closed an array of omnichannel deals with real net-new volume, despite a deliberately small team in market and a pipeline several times larger than its previously closed business. Among the wins is PayPal’s first government deal.
“Which is not the kind of logo you expect to win in payments this early,” he said, “and exactly the kind of proof point that tells you the model works.”
