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Catherine Porter is chief business officer at identity verification company Prove Identity.
How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? I am the chief business officer at Prove Identity, an identity verification and authentication platform for businesses that mitigates fraud and reduces account friction while enhancing the customer experience. Our products offer solutions for verifying customer identity, billing, and shipping, spanning across the entire commerce workflow, including onboarding and signup, streamlining checkout processes, and curating a strong pipeline of trusted customers. In my role, I expand Prove’s presence into new verticals, and lead the company as we develop identity verification and authentication solutions to tackle the sophisticated threats and scams emerging from the increase in AI.
One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? I am fluent in Japanese and spent 14 years working in and with companies in Japan. Beyond my LinkedIn profile, my superpower is making the complicated simple, and the impossible scalable. I have taken on very early-stage, complex problems for companies and shipped solutions, markets, and whole ecosystems over and over again because I’m an optimist at heart, and believe deeply in building global teams that are wired to get to a “yes” for launching and scaling big ideas.
What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Easily when I was the partnerships and ecosystem lead for Libra, and ultimately became the VP of payments partnerships for all apps under Meta’s umbrella. I believe deeply in financial inclusion for everyone in the world, and being early in the stablecoin/global payments journey was transformational for how I view building and launching on a global scale. Earlier this year at Prove, we launched our verified users tool, which leverages continuous user authentication to help brands distinguish between trusted users and bots on their platforms, enabling them to proactively adapt to new and emerging threats, deliver the lowest fraud rates, and reassure customers to transact securely and confidently. Verified users will have a massive impact beyond retail as well, for industries like fintech, the gig economy, digital marketplaces, and more, that require more customer trust.
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Which emerging retail trend are you most excited about right now, and why? I am most excited about the rise of agentic commerce, and search and discovery for consumers made available now through AI. For example, I’ve used AI to plan international travel, holiday gifts, and summer camp experiences for my family, and AI has opened up so many more opportunities than I could have imagined on my own. Adding in loyalty and incentives for the inevitable wave of bot-based shopping—and being able to pass my identity on to a bot that shops for me based on my preferences and loyalty schemes—is a future I am excited about.
What’s your go-to coffee order? A grande caffè misto with whole milk.
Worst piece of advice you’ve received? “You cannot build a career as a generalist.” Being a generalist, and building experience across functions inside a business, was the best career path I could have built for myself. Oftentimes, people are told to “pick a lane” when it comes to career and interests, and that works for many people. But thinking broadly, raising your hand to tackle first-of-its-kind problems and being willing to learn on the fly, and taking on new challenges and problem sets as an executive is rewarding, too. I have been able to design a career for myself that allows me to solve big problems for companies I care deeply about, while continuing an exciting growth trajectory with new challenges.
What was your favorite retail product when you were 15, and what’s your favorite retail product now? I started working in retail when I was 15, at The Limited, and for years at Ann Taylor. I spent all my earnings on clothes, Auntie Anne’s pretzels at the mall, and gas for my car. Now, my favorite retail experience is Net-a-Porter—a far cry from my teenage budget! But I love well merchandised and efficient fashion (I can shop for a season in 30 minutes), and Net-a-Porter does it best.