The final episode of The Leaders’ Room season three features Aaron J Webster, global chief risk officer at PayPal. This series is created in partnership with IDA Ireland.
In season three of The Leaders’ Room podcast, we once again got to know the leaders of some of the most influential multinationals in tech, life sciences and innovation, as well as getting insights into their leadership styles and industry trends they see coming down the line.
In the final episode of Season 3, we speak to Aaron J Webster, global chief risk officer at PayPal, about his journey to his current role, the latest innovations at PayPal and the summer announcement that PayPal is creating 100 new high-skilled data science roles in Ireland, as it launched its new AI and Fraud Data Science Centre in Dublin.
“Ireland is a quintessential part of our PayPal family because it bridges our east and west,” says Webster. “It’s perfectly located to allow our team members to interact with our teammates in Asia as well as our teammates in North America.
“We are so excited to further invest in Ireland, bringing over a hundred new jobs, specifically moving up the value chain into data science and artificial intelligence,” he says, adding that he’s hugely impressed with the talent pool here and hopes the centre will be “an innovation incubator for supporting our global markets”.
PayPal invented digital person-to-person payments back in 1998 and today, Webster says, it deals with the “incredible complexity” of how you move $2trn of money around the world across 45m merchants and 430m consumers.
“We are the most prolific two-sided network powering what is the lifeblood of many countries, which is their small business community, and then also unlocking the value of both consumers in their own country as well as bringing cross-border consumers to those small businesses, whether it be in Ireland or anywhere in the world.”
Risk management is, he says, one of the key ways that PayPal enables that to happen.
“If you think about just moving that scale of money around the world, there are bad actors out there that want a piece of that, whether it be fraud, money laundering, people buying things that they shouldn’t buy. These are all the things that our risk management team stops from happening.”
However, he adds, there are many things that the risk team also enables, such as “frictionless experiences”.
“When we know you, we trust you, and we want that to be a seamless experience. So the more that we know about you from an identity perspective, the more that we build personalised data experiences within the PayPal ecosystem, the easier we can make it for you to transact with PayPal, whether it’s buying from a merchant in China, Ireland or the US – or anywhere in the world.”
It is that role as an enabler that Webster sees as a key element of leadership when it comes to risk management. He says good risk leadership means finding ways to say ‘yes’ safely, enabling business growth while protecting customers, and not just blocking actions. You have to ensure you don’t default to ‘no’, he says.
As regards leadership in general, Webster has travelled the world and worked in multiple countries, and today he says he draws from all those different corporate cultures.
He believes good leaders have a “founder’s mentality” where you take ownership beyond your role, tackling problems beyond your own remit, and of course maintain the passion and intensity of a start-up founder. But Webster’s very first answer on leadership is telling I think. A good leader has humility, he says, and treats those at all levels of the organisation with respect. It’s a lesson that seems lost on some in our current environment.
This is the final episode of season three of the podcast. We’re grateful to all our interviewees for taking the time to come into the studio and share their insights and their intelligence for this season of The Leaders’ Room. And a big thanks as ever to our partners IDA Ireland who have made this series possible.
The Leaders’ Room podcast is released fortnightly and can be found by searching for ‘The Leaders’ Room’ wherever you get your podcasts. For those who prefer their audio with visuals, filmed versions of the podcast interviews are all available here on SiliconRepublic.com. Keep an eye and ear out. We’ll be back soon with season four.
Check out The Leaders’ Room podcast for in-depth insights from some of Ireland’s top leaders. Listen now on Spotify, on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
