Ryan
McEndarfer

Product Manager

Senior PM in fintech. I build AI agent systems on the side.

See my workContact
Ryan McEndarfer in a gray suit and light blue shirt, standing at the corner of a stone building

Work

Experience

Great Gray Trust Company

Senior Product Manager2025 to present

I built the AI integration roadmap for the RPAG product line, cutting customer support escalations and adding an intelligent digital assistant.

  • Led a SaaS platform cost-reduction effort that cut external vendor costs substantially.
  • Used AI-generated proto-personas to speed up discovery and ship features faster.

Blackhawk Network

Principal Product Manager2022 to 2025

I identified larger payout opportunities that required expanding beyond prepaid, enabling class action payouts and one-time distributions, giving Blackhawk control of more payment options and expanding revenue.

  • Led strategy and go-to-market for a $300B market expansion; the product processed $300M in disbursements in its first quarter.
  • Cut B2B onboarding time-to-value from 72 hours to 4.
  • Raised profitability 30% with a data-driven pricing strategy.

PaymentsJournal

Editor-in-Chief / Product ManagerMercator Advisory Group2015 to 2022

I grew the business from $0 to $1.5M ARR.

  • Hosted 300+ podcast episodes with 380K+ downloads, covering the payments and fintech landscape: blockchain, faster payments, debit, credit and prepaid.
  • Led a full platform redesign: traffic up 569%, revenue up 531%.

See the story →

Companies I've worked with

  • The Credit Union ConnectionVideo editing and short-form clips, plus technology maintenance.
  • Vigliotti, Gambaccini & Akerson, P.C.Designed and set up the firm's internal network storage.
  • Oak Services GroupConsulting on building AI agent teams.
  • IronshoreBuilt the company website.

Side projects

Built on my own time with a team of AI agents. Separate from my roles above.

Mission Control overview on a desktop: an approvals strip reading 1 waiting, the inbox, today's research digest, the agents list and the active projects
The overview: anything risky shows up as a waiting approval.

Mission Control

Problem
I had a team of AI agents building things for me, and I needed a way to track, evaluate and manage their work.

Solution
A private dashboard and chat for the team, with a tap-to-approve card for anything risky.

So far: 59 merged pull requests in its first week, backed by an automated test suite.

See how it works →

The Book Reels clip, made by my video studio agents. Plays without sound.

Book Reels

Problem
I spend too much time doom scrolling, so I wanted that time to be more productive.

Solution
Book Reels turns a book into a feed of short, narrated teaching cards I can flick through.

So far: three public-domain books live: Plato's Apology (10 cards), Marcus Aurelius' Meditations (75) and Machiavelli's The Prince (59).

The pilot video, final render. Plays without sound.

Video Studio

Problem
I wanted to make polished videos about what I build, but I'm not a video editor and I don't have the hours.

Solution
A team of video agents with six approval gates, and I sign off on each one.

So far: the pilot video went through all six gates: 27 seconds, rendered on a small home server in about a minute.

A research digest note: title, focus line, first pick, its take and why it matters to the team
A digest note, with the take and why it matters.

Research Desk

Problem
AI research moves faster than I can read, and I wanted both me and my agent team to keep learning how to run better.

Solution
A researcher agent scans for new papers every weekday and posts five picks to my chat.

So far: the first scheduled digest on 5 October narrowed 636 candidates to 5 picks, including a hand-picked 2023 paper.

Shipped

96

pull requests merged since Sep 30

34 in the last 7 days

I ship. These are pull requests my agent team has merged across my side projects.

How it ships

  1. An agent builds itA developer agent works on its own branch and opens a pull request.
  2. Agents check itA code reviewer and a QA agent test it and send it back until it passes.
  3. I approve the releaseNothing reaches main until I approve it on a card.

Updated Oct 11

Now

What I'm thinking about right now.

RWA Flows

An explorer for tokenized real-world assets, like tokenized funds such as BlackRock's BUIDL. It maps how these securities move from wallet to wallet on-chain, using public, read-only blockchain data.

Live today: a monthly flow (Sankey) view, wallet pages and data-trust checks across four Ethereum funds. Next: Franklin Templeton's BENJI on Stellar, and a watchlist. Not investment advice.

Monthly flow (Sankey) chart for BlackRock's BUIDL in September 2026: tokens held at the start of the month and new subscriptions flow through holder addresses and DeFi protocols to redemptions or to balances held at month end
The monthly flow view: one fund, one month, from public on-chain data. Tap to enlarge.

Trading floor

A backtesting team of AI agents (strategist, data, quant developer, risk, validator and desk head) that turns a plain-English trading idea into an honest backtest.

That means fees, slippage and out-of-sample tests, always compared with buy-and-hold. Research only, with no broker keys and no live trading. It's on the drawing board while I finish the plan.

  1. Plain-English idea
  2. StrategistTurns it into a testable spec
  3. DataClean daily prices
  4. Quant devBacktest with fees and slippage
  5. ValidatorOut-of-sample, vs buy-and-hold. Most ideas stop here.
  6. RiskSizing, drawdown, when to stop
  7. Desk headWrites the verdict
  8. Honest report
How an idea moves across the floor. Each step is one agent.

Mission Control, next

Improving the control room for my agent team. Recently added: a pixel-art Station view where agents walk to their desks as they work, and a private previews site for reviewing designs.

Also new: voice input and spoken replies, and a twice-daily release train where one approval ships a batch of reviewed changes.

The pixel-art Station view: a space station with rooms for each team (design studio, research lab, bridge, video studio, dev bay, finance and more), with small robot agents working at their desks
The Station view, shown with demo agents.

Contact

LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/ryanmcendarfer
Email
hello at ryanmcendarfer dot com