Sitara Zafar

Product leader with 9+ years of experience owning end-to-end regulatory licensing and payments product strategy across multiple markets and licenses in the UK, EU, and APAC — deep, hands-on fluency across payment, payment-aggregator, and money-service licensing regimes, safeguarding, SWIFT, and cross-border payment rails across a network of 100+ banking partners. At Payoneer, owned full lifecycle product implementation and post-launch for the Hong Kong MSO and Singapore MPI licenses, and led discovery, go-to-market strategy, vendor selection, and implementation for India's PA-CB license — working cross-functionally with Legal, Compliance, Banking, Business, and Operations teams to validate what a market needs before committing, then owning the roadmap and delivery against it. Served as regulatory team lead for 8 months, directly managing two Product Managers based in New York and Israel.

Operating comfortably at both levels — hands-on delivery and bridging senior leadership — presenting a well-reasoned, evidence-based point of view to executives while staying close enough to the work to unblock a team day to day. Early, hands-on adopter of agentic AI to move faster: architected production Claude-based agent systems for executive reporting and incident management, and used Cursor and Lovable to rapidly prototype onboarding and payment flows before formal build.

Principal Product Manager at Payoneer (2022-02 – 2026-07)

Own strategy and roadmap for global payment licensing and regulatory product across multiple markets and licenses — including payment, payment-aggregator, and money-service licenses, safeguarding, KYC/KYB, sanctions, and AML, working across SWIFT and correspondent banking rails with 100+ banking partners globally.

Lead licensing discovery for new markets: validating regulatory requirements and customer demand cross-functionally with Legal, Compliance, Banking, Business, and Operations teams, then translating that into roadmap and delivery. Partner with Engineering and Data to ship.

• Served as regulatory team lead for 8 months, directly managing two Product Managers based in New York and Israel — setting priorities across regulatory workstreams, unblocking delivery, and providing regular feedback and coaching.
• Led the Singapore MPI license go-to-market — one of the first licensing initiatives delivered after joining Payoneer, and a full licensing-discovery-to-launch cycle: validating regulatory requirements, integrating Singpass (Singapore's national digital identity platform) into onboarding, and passing external audit for go-live approval with no high-risk exposure findings. First market at Payoneer to build on a national digital identity standard rather than defaulting to generic document checks.
• Led the Hong Kong MSO license implementation, which introduced a new national identity document and multiple business verification requirements into onboarding and payment safeguarding flows. Evaluated several identity vendors and selected one offering business verification and beneficial-owner access, increasing approval rates by roughly 10% and reducing friction through automated document and business verification. Migrating customers from Payoneer's global license to the Hong Kong MSO license protected close to $48M in annual revenue with minimal customer churn. Partnered across Compliance, Legal, R&D, Ops, and Marketing to stabilize funnel metrics and strengthen platform trust in a high-risk market.
• Leading the e2e implementation of India's Payment Aggregator – Cross Border (PA-CB) license, targeting $25M in annual revenue protection through complex verification solutions including Video KYC, Digital ID (Digilocker) integrations via local vendor, KYB enhancements, data localization, and GST tax infrastructure. Partnered closely with Payoneer's banking lead to define Citibank's requirements for the PA-CB import/export payment flows, and orchestrated cross-functional alignment across Legal, Compliance, and Business teams. Performed discovery and implemented the import payment out solution using Payoneer's mass payout capability, building a lean MVP to fit tight timelines, resources, and derisk losing the PA-CB license — successfully tested in production and now awaiting go-live approval. Executing a controlled soft launch to collect customer feedback and prepare for final regulatory approval, targeting a December 2026 launch. Currently redesigning the onboarding workstream into a single flexible flow across company, sole-proprietor, and individual segments, including marketplace-partner onboarding (eBay, Amazon) — targeting a 5% increase in approval rates with fewer manual reviews and data mismatches.
• Strategically led the Sanctions Solution in response to U.S. OFAC sanctions on Donetsk & Luhansk, designing an end-to-end risk and communication framework for 100K+ impacted customers. Implemented automated controls to reduce false positives, coordinated remediation and customer outreach, and collaborated across R&D, Product, Ops, CX, Sales, Marketing, Legal, and Compliance to protect legitimate users and minimize business impact.
• Led the global GDPR Data Minimization initiative impacting 25+ million accounts in scope, reducing regulatory exposure to penalties of up to 2% of global annual turnover by designing automated, compliant data-deletion workflows tailored to each license's retention period. Worked across 100 platform services and hundreds of data tables to identify, map, and integrate to the GDPR API service.
• Architected and deployed production Claude-based agentic AI systems — a weekly executive briefing automation, an automated PRD review tool, and an incident-status summarization system — via Microsoft 365 MCP integrations, reducing administrative overhead across 8–15 concurrent workstreams and freeing up time for pre-read materials over status meetings.
• Used Cursor for agentic AI-assisted development and Lovable to rapidly prototype and live-design onboarding logic and fallback flows, accelerating iteration with Engineering and UX before formal build.

Senior Product Manager at Northern Trust (2016 – 2022)

Managed regulatory tax products impacting asset servicing and custody business, including roadmap, vision, client experience, and launch management.

• Generated £4M+ new annual revenue by executing full product lifecycle of Common Reporting Standard (CRS) reporting to ensure compliance with nine jurisdictional regulatory nuances.
• Gained competitive advantage in regulatory tax services through thought leadership in market advocacy forums and directing cross-functional workstreams.
• Led Brexit-related regulatory changes impacting clients and core Custody business products, related to withholding tax across different investment assets.

Founder at Givr (2019 – 2022)

Created an inventory and HR management Firebase web app (B2B2C) connecting people to causes. Self-taught React Native and JavaScript development to execute vision from conception to MVP, securing adoption from Hillsong Refugee Response.

Tax Manager, US Tax & Financial Services Limited at US Tax & Financial Services Limited (2014 – 2017)

• Generated £500K+ new business and established strategic partnerships with US commercial services.

Senior Consultant at PwC

Consultant at Grant Thornton

Associate at Deloitte

Psychological Operations Specialist at U.S. Army Reserve

Founder & Lead at Surf Queens (2024 – Present)

Built and lead a women's surf community; organized international surf retreats (Morocco, Portugal) including instructor partnerships and group logistics, plus regular local sessions at The Wave, Bristol.

Master of Science in Taxation – Golden Gate University (2008)

Bachelor of Arts in International Relations – San Francisco State University (2006)

BCS Level 4 Data Analyst Certification in Data Analyst – Alpha Development (2021)