The poaching in payments continues. The inimitable Tricia Duryee at AllThingsD reported yesterday that mobile POS company Square has hired away PayPal's VP of products for North America Alyssa Cutright. Cutright had been with PayPal for 12 years. Square told Duryee that Cutright will head international expansion for Square. (Square's plans for an international push is news in itself. The company only operates in the U.S. at the moment while knock-offs have sprung up in places like Canada, Sweden and China.)

The news comes less than a week after PayPal launched its own mobile POS system PayPal Here. While PayPal said Cutright didn't work on the PayPal Here project, the loss of another high profile product executive to a competitor seems to be a trend for PayPal. Stephanie Tilenius and Osama Bedier were just two of the senior executives who left PayPal for Google. Tilenius and Bedier went to head up the Google Wallet project, a move that led to an acrimonious, and ongoing, legal battle between the two companies.

But even Google isn't immune to losing its personnel to other companies and projects. In recent weeks, Google Wallet has seen its product lead Marc Freed-Finnegan and co-founding engineer Jonathan Wall leave for a new, relatively mysterious mobile payment start-up called Tappmo. That follows a host of moves and reshuffling within the Google Wallet team, even including a change in duties for Tilenius. NFC Times has a good rundown of the moves and defections here.

It all goes to show that as the mobile payment market expands, the pool of talented executives with payment experience has stayed small.

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