Daraz (Alibaba Group) Payment Operations + COD-to-Digital Conversion

Owned the payments operations spine for Alibaba-group Daraz across 5 South Asian markets through a COVID-driven volume surge. Designed the COD-to-digital migration as an incentives + trust program (not a checkout redesign), localised Alipay and regional wallets in partnership with Hangzhou product teams, and rebuilt settlement, dispute and fraud workflows so payments became a measured surface instead of a back-office liability.

Marketplace payments were COD-dominated, sellers were carrying the working-capital cost, dispute resolution was multi-week and fraud rules were uniform across categories that had nothing in common. COVID 2020 multiplied order volume ~3× overnight, exposing every weakness in the ops spine simultaneously across 5 markets with different rails, regulators and customer behaviours.

• Unified settlement workflow closing the loop buyer pay-in → seller payout → logistics reconciliation across all 5 markets
• Dispute resolution playbook with category-aware SLAs (electronics ≠ fashion ≠ groceries) — cut average cycle ~50%
• Fraud rule taxonomy tuned per category × geography × seller cohort, replacing one-size-fits-all rules
• Alipay localisation on checkout in partnership with Alibaba Hangzhou product teams (expanded coverage ~40%)
• COD-to-digital incentive design: targeted wallet/card promos to high-COD segments, refund-speed guarantees as a trust signal
• Operational dashboards across pay-in success, refund SLA and per-rail settlement, surfacing the metrics ops actually used

Owned multi-country payment operations governance + the COD-to-digital migration program. Direct accountability for ops KPIs across 5 markets. Coordinated with Daraz country GMs, Alibaba Hangzhou product, and regional payment partners. Built the PMO-style tracking that ran payment operations during peak surge.

• Lifted digital share by ~40% in 6 months — unlocked working capital that COD had been consuming
• Cut average dispute resolution cycle by ~50% via category-aware SLAs
• Held payment operations through a ~3× COVID volume surge across 5 markets with no major settlement-cycle slip
• Expanded checkout payment coverage ~40% via Alipay + regional wallet localisation
• Turned payments from a back-office liability into a measured, owned surface inside the marketplace org

• Centralised dispute SLAs sometimes slowed bespoke resolutions; net cycle time still dropped ~50%
• Wallet/card incentives carried short-term promo cost; recovered via working-capital release within ~2 quarters

• COD is product debt, not customer preference. Incentives + refund-speed guarantees shift it; checkout copy doesn't.
• Sellers experience payments through settlement, not checkout. The ops spine, not the buyer flow, decides marketplace trust.
• Fraud rules age fast on marketplaces. Per-category × geography × cohort segmentation beats a global threshold by a wide margin.

Marketplace and platform payments orgs at Stripe Connect, Adyen for Platforms, Wise Business, MercadoPago and Shopee operate exactly this surface: multi-country pay-in/payout, per-category fraud, settlement-side seller trust, and a COD-to-digital wedge in emerging markets. The playbook ports directly.