Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A by Steve Robinson; it’s available in hardback at https://amzn.to/460LnmQ, on Kindle at https://amzn.to/3RVXhZs, and as an audiobook at https://amzn.to/3xPjBgn.
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Paperback = https://amzn.to/3VEl7cU, Kindle = https://amzn.to/45JGm1L, and audiobook = https://amzn.to/3RPhC2y.
• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4).
• Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First by Martha Piper & Indira Samarasekera. Paperback (https://amzn.to/3tOtzg4) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/41OYdT5).

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Jennifer Marriner is the Executive Vice President of Global Acceptance Solutions at Mastercard. She leads the product evolution and strategy for Mastercard’s acceptance solutions, ensuring the company’s payments products drive usage and shape future commerce experiences. Prior to Mastercard, Jennifer spent over 16 years at PayPal, leading the Global Markets and Partnerships team. She also managed strategic merchant growth for The Royal Bank of Scotland’s acquiring division and worked at The Wall Street Journal. Based in London, Jennifer is the executive sponsor of Mastercard’s Women Leadership Network (WLN) and ADAPT.

Sherri Haymond is Co-President of Global Partnerships and a member of the company’s Management Committee.

Sherri co-leads a unique team that works with partners large and small to create disruptive products and solutions. As our world becomes borderless and even more digitally connected, Sherri’s team keeps a pulse on the industry and collaborates with partners to ensure Mastercard delivers innovative and differentiated products and services at scale to meet the needs of today’s evolving businesses and consumers.

Sherri holds a B.A. in Literature from Duke University and a J.D. from University of Pennsylvania Law School. She serves on the board of MoCADA, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, in Brooklyn, NY.

Transcript
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Unknown Speaker 0:00
For some companies, innovation is not an option. Their success depends on staying ahead of the curve, always leading their industry, never following. That’s the case with MasterCard. In this first of a two part series, senior execs Jennifer Mariner and Sherry Heyman, discuss the FinTech firm’s history and the new innovations making your transactions more seamless and secure, developing innovation in leaders is the core of our business. Check out our own innovative leadership offerings on our website at innovative leadership.

Unknown Speaker 0:40
Welcome to innovating leadership co creating our future. I’m your host. Maureen Metcalf, the founder and CEO of the innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready, helping us in this mission. Today is Sherry Hammond, co president of Global Partnerships for MasterCard, and Jen Mariner, executive vice president of global acceptance solutions at MasterCard. First, we’ll be discussing with Jen the changing face of new payments technology. Then we’ll talk about CO creating with partners to bring transformation at scale. With sherry. Jen, thank you. We’re delighted that you’re joining us. Thank you so much. Maureen, it’s great to be here. Let’s talk about building technology being the first step in this process. How you think about it and how do you ensure scale? Because scale is obviously required for MasterCard, absolutely. So the way that we pay has totally changed over the last couple of decades. We’re now even more than ever focused on ensuring the transactions are safe. They’re simple, and they’re secure, and they’re digital, because the physical world of interacting and the online world of interacting with payments have converged, and consumers and businesses, they expect to be able to pay and be paid wherever, whenever, however they want. And obviously MasterCard is in a unique position, but we’ve got over 100 million merchants. We’ve got more than 3 billion card holders, so we act as a really powerful connective tissue in the payments ecosystem. But to your point where we need to focus is on building that technology and innovating in that technology to ensure that we’re able to deliver the right experiences for merchants, consumers and all of the technology and partners that sit in between. What we do is really think about innovation. We recognize the changing landscape, and we embrace those changes by continuing to think about who are the new commerce players and the new business models that exist, and then how do we enhance the technology or create new solutions to meet these new integrated and sophisticated ways in which customers want to be able to make payments, and we’re constantly looking for, what are the white spaces for the future? What are the emerging trends that are coming so that we can make sure that we’re innovating in a future proof way to bring the ecosystem together? So ultimately, we have to make sure that it’s easy for merchants, consumers and the whole value chain to actually participate. And if we do that, then we’ll continue to scale. You said, 3 billion customers, 3 billion card holders. So that’s just one area of our customer. Sorry, I’m just thinking with 8 billion people on the planet, that’s slightly short of half of the world’s population, in some way engaging with MasterCard, and as you’ve said, that doesn’t necessarily account for all of the business segments, exactly. Maureen, so then, as you’re talking about the white space, are we close to a reality where physical cards and manual entry will disappear without plastic? I think your vision for the future is right, but let’s look a little bit about where we’ve come from to get to here. As I mentioned a moment ago, we’ve played a fundamental part in payments technology and how we’ve digitized that over the last decade and beyond. This is from contactless cards to tokenization and obviously into the investment we make in cyber security, there’s more options than ever to be paid and to pay. You know, I mentioned tokenization. 10 years ago, tokenization was introduced, and this is where we remove the need for a physical card number, because we create a tokenized version of it to safely use in the ecosystem. Just in this 10 year period, 25% of our transactions are now tokenized on the MasterCard network, and that’s growing 50% year on year. You’ve got contactless payments, which now more than two thirds of in person transactions are contactless globally and in some markets, like here in Europe, more than 90% are contactless.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Payments, then you think about, okay, how do you innovate? From there, contactless payments has allowed us to start thinking about tap on phone, where we’re taking the 7 billion smartphones that exist in the world and turning each one of those into an acceptance device. We’re really seeing this progression in both the in person space, but also with the likes of click to pay technology, which is now available in 35 markets around the globe, also in the online space and so customers. Nowadays, it’s not just about how it used to be where we signed on a piece of paper to pay for an item you were purchasing. Customers can go into a coffee shop, grab a drink, tap their phone, they can wave their hand, or they can even smile from a biometrics payment perspective when they’re shopping online. So there’s really a lot of different ways in which we’re interacting, but to your point in the future, because we’re building those technology solutions, we will get to a point where you don’t need a physical card. It can be done digitally and manual entry is already disappearing with click to pay. That’s already starting to be phased out, and we’re really seeing an opportunity now for us to lean in with partners to make sure we are creating more value, greater access, but always in a secure way for our customers. I love the idea of not needing a physical card. Yes. How can we continue to build on these new behaviors and take it a step further for greater efficiency, you just mentioned a moment ago those customers who don’t want to or can’t use a card for whatever reason during the pandemic, contact list searched, and that was really because that’s how everyone felt comfortable being able to pay. People embraced this new technology around contactless payments, you know, and as a result of that innovation and scale and adoption that we’ve seen, particular segments have embraced it at an even faster rate. We think about transit in many cities around the world. Now you simply tap as you’re traveling around a city, because that is just the most convenient way to pay. And from a merchant perspective, or for the transit authority perspective, suddenly you’re just increasing the footfall, increasing the efficiency. It’s Win, win all round. We’re at a point where we can really harness this momentum that’s happening around contactless and start to think about new ways we’ve taken the baseline contactless transaction that happens in a store, and now, as I mentioned earlier, you’re now seeing tap on phone where folks are tapping, literally on the phones of merchants to take a payment. This is a really fantastic opportunity for us to help micro sellers who didn’t want to or don’t have the capacity to invest in the technology of a terminal, and also in locations around the world where it didn’t exist. The terminal infrastructure you can now take payments via a mobile device instantly being able to take that payment, or even moving to the next step of that, which is what we’re terming, is tap to more so beyond just tapping to pay, we’re now seeing you being able to instantly provision your card into a mobile wallet, into a digital wallet, by tapping it on your phone and gathering the data to place it into your wallet in a secure way. We’re seeing verification happening. So if a merchant is a little unsure about your identity when you’re making a transaction, they might say, tap your card onto your phone. Just provide us with that, with that additional reassurance. And then we’re even now starting to think about, how can we have peer to peer, P to P, money exchange through your own phones, where you might tap two phones together, or tap a card onto a phone where you want to split the bill for dinner. For example. There’s all these new ways in which we’re thinking about the tap technology, but we do recognize that might not be for everybody, and choice is important. So in many markets, we’re reflecting on the prevalence of QR code and making sure that QR is available. You’ve got consumers who want to scan a code with a scan a code to pay and then pick up their items in store. For example, you’ve got small businesses that might display the QR code, and then the user can scan that and then go online through their smartphone and make a payment. And then a really unique scenario I’ve seen recently, which is a small business has their own corporate credit card, and on that credit card is a QR. So instead of them having a device to take a payment, their customer scans the QR on their card, pays through their phone, and then the monies are distributed back to the card of that small business, and they can then go and use that card to shop elsewhere. So we’re really helping the customers, be that the card holder as a customer or the merchant, build out new behaviors, new ways of operating, so that they have more access to their monies. I see it at my farmers market, so I go to the farmers market on Saturday morning after yoga. So I also.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Often don’t have my wallet because I’ve just come out of yoga class, and the farmers markets open for 15 minutes. So I run over to the market the merchants if I have my credit card, generally, it’s tapped to phone. Sometimes I don’t have my credit card, and often I can scan a QR code and send money. Now I don’t know if it goes to their credit cards. You hear the beep, and then I get to take away my fruits or vegetables or whatever. And I assume many of these, specifically farmers investing what used to be hundreds of dollars in the technology would make this go from a viable economic proposition to a not viable proposition, absolutely, absolutely. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, how can we remove the barriers, the cost barriers to merchants small and large, who want to be able to take payments in a digital way, in a secure way, and this is just one of the ways in which we’re doing that. Basically, the MasterCard is a business partner for companies across the range of size and scale. When you talk to Sherry later on, I’m sure she’ll tell you a lot more around the partnerships that we have. That absolutely partnership at the heart of what we do, it’s incredibly important. And partnerships with all parts of the ecosystem, small and large, is there a technology that is personally more exciting to you? I think the first thing to say is, other than payment geeks like me, most people don’t wake up in the morning and think about making a payment. That’s not what you do. You think about, I want to have this experience, which will cost me, potentially, a fee to do so. I want to make that or I want to have that treat, and at the end of it, it’s by it’s making that payment at the end, but you don’t wake up thinking about the payment. And so what excites me the most is, how can we just embed the payment in the shopping experience? And so what we’re seeing now is as we’re leveraging what we’re calling a secure card on file, where people can register with a merchant securely through tokenization, keep their payment credentials with the merchant, and then when they check out, use biometrics. What that really means is the payment just becomes a natural part of the journey, and you can focus on what you want, which is that shopping experience. And it also means that for the merchants, they can focus on understanding who their customer is, personalizing that experience for them, making sure they’ve got the right loyalty and marketing programs in place to encourage the engagement with that customer. It really just makes a really seamless experience for the consumer, which obviously, from a merchant perspective, they want the best experience for their customer. This embedded technology is what excites me the most. I think now, does that mean that when I go to Lowe’s to buy whatever Home Improvement thing, we’re going to remove the checkout counter, either I’ll scan things when I take them off the shelf, or I’ll walk through a machine and it’ll scan everything. Yeah, we’re already seeing that sort of thing happening, which is fantastic. You have experience. Have experiences now where you walk into a store, it might scan your face, so biometrically, they’ll know that it’s you that’s walked in. You’ve already got a relationship with that merchant. You can take your goods as you’re traveling around the store, and as you exit the store, they’ll be aware of what you’ve collected. And then, obviously, behind the scenes, take the funds for those items that you’ve purchased but you’ve already built that relationships. It really does give an opportunity for there to be a stronger connection between the customer and the merchant, and we’re facilitating that and removing the friction. For most of us, we don’t have enough time in our day going to a merchant rather than buying something online. If the friction goes away, I am more likely to go to that merchant or and we also friction going away online. How do you make that the simple and seamless experience? We know that merchants and the ecosystem have worked so hard to improve the logistics of delivery. For example, our job is to make sure we also improve the logistics of making the payment and improving the conversion rate, accelerating the checkout times to make it a really smooth experience, whether you’re in person or online. So then that leads into the question, why didn’t we need to keep evolving both physical and online experiences, even though what we’ve got works what we’ve got works today, and as we all know, we can’t stand still. We have to be thinking about tomorrow, not least because, unfortunately, the fraudsters are always thinking about tomorrow, and so we need to stay a step ahead. And so evolving our in person and our online experiences means that we stay a step ahead of the fraudsters. We’re investing in the technology, we’re investing in that security stair step ahead, but we’re also making sure that as customers, blur the lines between online and in store. So for example, in the morning, I’m super busy dropping kids off at school, as I’m coming into work, I’ll have ordered my coffee in advance from my app, drop the kids off, run into the store, and there it is. May.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Making sure that we evolve so that as a customer, I don’t know, did I just do an in person transaction or an online transaction? Does that merchant know that it was me, whether I was online or in store? We’re making sure that all of those things can come together. We make sure that there is a real understanding of that consumer behavior by the merchant, and that the consumer can interact in whatever way they wish. Providing choice is the number one focus for us. We need to make sure that all the consumers have access to the new products, new solutions, new services, new relationships, and they feel confident in doing that. The two things that stand out to me are reduced friction, quicker is always better and secure. How do I make sure that using my either physical card or digital card or my face enables me to pay for only the stuff I bought that I don’t get home and find out that Lowe’s accidentally charged me for the stuff the person who walked out right behind me purchased. We’re part of the ecosystem, and we need to build that trust for the whole ecosystem. I love the focus on evolution to retain your competitive advantage. To that end, then how are you looking at the rise of new business models, one being the gig economy. As you talk about the merchant there is so many new and evolving business models that exist, and where we’re very fortunate is that with the footprint of MasterCard that we talked about, both in terms of our Merchant base, our technology reach, and also our consumers who have cards, we have multiple dimensions where we’re able to interact. So not only is our acceptance reached the traditional in store locations or merchant websites. We’re now building really strong relationships with the new business models that’s the merchants or the sellers that sit behind marketplaces or platforms or staged wallets. So if you think about a seller on Etsy or a driver the Uber or the homeowner who’s rented out via Airbnb. In all those cases, we are working with those platform providers to make sure that we can facilitate payments safely and securely for all of those parts of the business is we’re thinking about that digital economy, we’re recognizing that there are different ways in which we can interact. I mentioned UberEATS, for example. So you make an Uber Eats order, and you do that through the app. So that’s one transaction through the app, but that app then pays the restaurant. So we’re making sure we’re facilitating. How can you also then pay the restaurant? You’re also paying a tip to the driver. Uber will also send the funds for their earnings to the driver as well, potentially to a prepaid card that they can then go on and use at a separate point. MasterCard is part of all of those stages of what used to be a transaction where you walked into a pizza parlor and purchased over the counter. We’re now part of this new ecosystem that exists. Another example is we have a fantastic relationship with Alipay in China, and as a tourist, if you go to China, where Alipay and the QR code of Alipay is the natural way to pay all throughout the country, what you can now do is add your MasterCard to an Alipay account, which means that through your phone, you are able to, in a cashless way, interact With all of the local Chinese merchants in the country utilizing your MasterCard. It really, then means, again, we’ve given the opportunity to bring a tourist into the Chinese market to shop, and we’ve also given the Chinese market the ability to receive those funds. So again, win, win by us being able to broker the use of our products and solutions with partners around the world. That sounds so much easier than I have to go get the currency of the country I’m traveling to. If my local bank doesn’t have it, they have to order it, or I have to get it there. And then, if I spend more than I planned, which is always the case, I don’t have the money to buy the thing, and so the vendor is then stuck dealing with me, trying to figure out, do they take dollars to or, yeah, it just seems like back to the friction of travel and shopping in other countries. It’s just easy. I use the example of China, but we’re seeing this now in many countries around the world, where we’re partnering with those local wallets, those domestic wallets, in order for us to bring the tourism industry into that market with those that have got a MasterCard in their hand coming from all over the world. So it’s a really good opportunity for us to help, particularly in some emerging markets, really bring in cross border volume and help the economy. If I go to China or Africa, or wherever I can make a purchase, which I did with my MasterCard, and didn’t have to worry about the conversion rate. So again, less friction, and the conversion rate MasterCard gets, I’m sure, is better than the conversion rate I get exactly you’re in both a competitive and a cooperative market. Mm, hmm.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
So as a FinTech and a payment service provider, you’re working with merchants, you’re working with people making purchases. You’re working with other payment services. Someone has a visa, you have a MasterCard, you’re moving money across those platforms. And yet, there is still a competitive nature of you want to grow, they want to grow. How does that work? My assumption is there has to be a lot of collaboration, or the FinTech industry doesn’t work. You’re spot on. Not wanting to reveal too much of my age, but I’ve been in the payments industry for nearly 20 years, and in that time, you know, people always talked about, oh my goodness, this is the next competitor. The next competitor. What we actually find is, and this was when I’m working at MasterCard, and even before that, in order for us to help the ecosystem as a whole, the consumers, the merchants, when we can collaborate, we can all grow we can grow the ecosystem. We can improve the experience. So you’re absolutely right. We spend a huge amount of time working with commerce enablers. What do I mean by that? If you think about the traditional ecosystem of having an issuer and an acquirer, there are now these amazing technology partners that we work with, what you might call an ISV, an independent software vendor, SAS, platforms, payment service providers, all of which have a really unique and additive role to play in the payments ecosystem, and we work with them to make sure that we’re ensuring that there is choice. There’s choice in terms of the payment method that are on offer. We’re ensuring that there’s convenience. Let’s make sure that these transactions are fast, they’re convenient. You can pay when, where, how you wish. And incredibly important, make sure they’re secure. We talked earlier about tokenization, cyber security, artificial intelligence. How do we bring that in, leveraging the relationships with these partners to make sure that this is a trusted and a safe transaction that’s happening, and we’ll continue with these partners to think about, how are we merging the digital and the physical world together to bring the best experience for the merchants and the consumers. Because I think, more than anything, what we recognize is that through these partnerships with commerce enablers, we can integrate the huge range of offerings that we have. So as I said, so there’s choice, there’s convenience and there’s security for millions of merchants we’ve talked about, but also for the billions of consumers around the world. My small ecosystem, I use PayPal, I use my MasterCard, I use Venmo, but I can also pull from my bank account if I want a good friend of mine, when I pay her, it goes on to her credit card. The range of options really allow people to live the life that suits them. Absolutely, we talk about making sure that we operate at the speed of life, and we know that that is different for everybody, and therefore we need to be able to adapt our solutions and support the ways in which they wish to pay and be paid by operating at the speed of life, the life that’s appropriate for each individual. The thing that really resonates with me is both the speed and the values, and you do that as well, that if I have a value that requires that I don’t leverage borrowing, but having a credit card that accommodates both my values, in many cases, requires a Security of Payment. I love that. The flexibility you provide now gives people access who didn’t have access before. We have to be there for everybody in the ecosystem. Thank you, Jen, this was really insightful as we think about what you wake up thinking about, how does the payments industry work? How to customers, how to merchants, How do humans live their lives? Yeah, and do it conveniently, safely, so that we can go on and not think about it because you are. Thank you. Maureen, how would people find out more about you if you blog or about what MasterCard is doing in the innovation space in this era, the first thing I would say is, please go to mastercard.com but I’d love to engage directly with the folks that have listened today, and you can do that through contacting me via LinkedIn. Jennifer Mariner, LinkedIn, so please do that. Thank you so much, Jennifer, it’s been great to talk to you. Been a pleasure.

Unknown Speaker 24:27
And now I’d like to introduce Sherry Heyman. She is the CO president of Global Partnerships and a member of the company’s management committee, and we’re going to be talking about CO creating with partnerships to bring transformation at scale, Sherry, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. Over the course of your career, you’ve seen the payments industry transform with digital and mobile device adoption as an undercurrent. How has your world changed? How has it not?

Unknown Speaker 24:57
How has my world changed, and how has the world changed?

Unknown Speaker 25:00
But it’s night and day. I mean looking back. So when I first joined MasterCard, it was July of 2010, and I actually joined the company as a lawyer. So I’m a lawyer by training, and I joined as a product lawyer. At first I was the lawyer for global prepaid debit and ATM, and then move quickly into a different role, where I was the lawyer for what was then called Emerging payments. Emerging payments is now kind of our digital payments practice, but back then, it was sort of a collection of various things that had no other home in the company that people had a hunch could propel us into the future, things like our virtual card number engine and things like, you know, the money sent the transaction that enables P to P payments and things like that, but it was more kind of individual, little point solutions or individual products, rather than platforms or a strategy. And you know, I was very fortunate. So Ed McLaughlin, who now is our president of technology, he got the role to lead this emerging payments small group, which was, again, then a very, very small group, a collection of random things into the future and like, have it figure out kind of form, what the backbone was going to be for digital payments. So PS, I worked with Ed and many others over the years to basically transform the guts of the way our infrastructure works to be suitable to support modern payments technology and innovation, we figured out things like, no payment data should just be at rest, unencrypted, right? And that was the kind of insight that grew into tokenization, which now fuels like all of E commerce payments and contactless payments. We figured out that that contactless payments should be more of a thing, right? And in various parts of the world, they had been on a journey to make those ubiquitous. We worked with various teams around the company to put the right rules and standards and the right incentives in place to move the rest of the ecosystem that way. And again, this bi directional payments thing. Initially, not every MasterCard debit card could receive payments. They can only make payments, but in order to turn that into a really vibrant two sided ecosystem, putting the infrastructure, the rules, the standards, both technology rails and business rails call it in place to make that ubiquitous, that has fueled partners like Venmo and remitly and wise and all of these companies that are now really big users of MasterCard send none of that stuff would exist if we hadn’t put these foundations in place way back when. What’s involved in that process? I’m a user of Venmo. My primary cards, business cards, personal cards, are all MasterCards. So I’m familiar as a user, but I just pull the thing out of my wallet or it pops up in my auto fill. And to me, it just happens, clearly for the company who made it possible for it just to happen. On my side, there’s a lot that you had to do to ensure that it happens consistently. Around the world, no matter what country I’m in, I use my MasterCard to get cash. That’s right, rather than going to currency exchange. That means I trust that it works no matter what country I’m in or what currency I’m using. That’s right. And so there was a giant enablement journey that we went on with the various leaders who led our MasterCard markets over the years. There had to be technology that was put into the system, call it, and it was ecosystem enablement, which is, by the way, the case with all of this stuff, with mobile payments, with tokenization. This is a P to P, like funds in, funds out, example, making sure that the issuer is an acquirer. So those are the banks that a consumer uses. Are the issuing banks and the banks on the merchant side. Those are the acquiring banks. They do a lot of the technical work to make sure that these different transaction types can happen in order for you to be able to send money to someone else using your MasterCard debit card, let’s say in order to make sure that all of those transactions are seamless and safe and secure, that they go through seamlessly. But there’s also transparency in those messages, so that the issuer, the acquirer, the consumer, the merchant, know what’s going on, and in the case of the P to P payments, also that they contain the necessary information that various government agencies regulators require that we include. We had to upgrade our whole system to create a new type of transaction called a funding transaction. They have to be coded in a certain way. Same with the funds out transactions. Then you take money from your paypal or Venmo wallet and you push it to your own debit card, for example, like if you have money sitting there and you want to cash out, those transactions are similarly coded a different way. It’s a different kind of transaction. It’s actually a push transaction, not a pull transaction, and it just works sort of the opposite of the way other transactions work. But in order to get that going, it’s a whole ecosystem enablement exercise where we have to work very closely with various partners in the ecosystem, not only the digital partners who are implementing the technology in this case, but also the issuing banks, the acquiring banks. Consumers have to learn how to use it. Merchants have to understand what to do.

Unknown Speaker 30:00
With it. So it’s a real team sport. That’s just one example, but it’s almost that everything that we do from an ecosystem enablement perspective, kind of follows that framework. Every single little bank around the globe, credit unions, small local banks, community banks, I get JP, Morgan and large banks, not so hard to navigate, because they’re in this ecosystem, but my little one branch, local bank has to also use the same standards so that you can read the transaction. That’s right. Who sets those is that a MasterCard, because you’re dealing with PayPal, who’s everywhere, Venmo, who’s everywhere, my Uber, who’s everywhere. Now it actually powers cash outs for Uber drivers. That’s how Uber drivers can get paid whenever they want, like right after a ride. They could cash out, like, my paypal wallet, sure, no, or just from their Uber account. Actually, okay, in that example, there’s many, many examples of, you know, the funds in, funds out. Technology has been adopted for various use cases. So it takes years to do this sometimes, I mean, in the case of kind of P to P payments, remittances, it was quite a long journey. Yes, bigger banks did tend to come on board first. But then over the years, what happens in the cycle is we have enablement efforts around it, where we do webinars and we try to get people on board. The account managers go out and try to help people get on board. And then consumers start asking their banks also for certain things. And merchants start asking their banks for certain things. That actually was part of the case with contactless. For example, turn your tax refund into better sleep at mattress warehouse. Save up to $850

Unknown Speaker 31:40
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Unknown Speaker 32:53
so we have an education push and things like that. But then there’s also a poll where various members of the ecosystem that may be lagging behind, are actually kind of dragged along by their customer base who’s demanding the technology upgrade, and so we obviously take advantage of that dynamic as well. Who funds the technology. You have a large backbone that then these banks poured into for Portal type of thing. Is that how it works or not? Everything is the same. Okay, the way that our tokenization system works and how that was built is actually different from the way our P to P system and how that was built is different from how certain of our fraud and security assets, those we may make a big acquisition and then incorporate elements of something like that, like into our transaction messages. It just depends. Generally, we have technology platforms that then we work with partners to understand what are the capabilities that we need to provide to power your business, to power your growth, to power what’s going on with you? A big part of that over the years has been just focus on making e commerce transactions, right? Like online transactions and in app transactions, very seamless. I mean, there is a whole operation that goes into making the beautiful, for example, Instacart or DoorDash experience that you might experience today, or getting an Uber or Lyft, or shopping on Amazon. There is 30,000 of us, you know, at least here at MasterCard, who work really hard at making, kind of just focused on E commerce for a second, making those transactions and everything that has to go into it. Think about it. You have to either enter a card number. It has to be saved somewhere, or you could be using a wallet to transact. There is generally authentication along the way, right? We need to make sure that you’re you. It then has to be submitted by the merchants, bank, the acquirer and the issuer has to approve it. So how do we improve that? We add more information into the transaction message and make it more transparent to them, and then we work with them to understand when should you optimally be approving transactions? I mean, there’s a whole.

Unknown Speaker 35:00
Kind of guts of it that goes into how it actually comes to life, and how it also could become a good enough technology that then companies, businesses are willing to build whole business models around it that rely on it, right? Because if it wasn’t reliable in the first place, there’s no way that Instacart would rely on, you know, they don’t take cash, right? The way that that works, is through an in app payment. And then on the back end of that, for example, we also facilitate, after you’ve paid into a platform like that, and you fill up your cart, you choose, you know, what you want from fresh market, or from Stu Leonard’s or Balducci’s, or wherever else you’re ordering from. When the shoppers in store, they then go and the way they check out with actually a MasterCard. The shopper checks out because it’s corporate money, like they’re not laying out the money for you. Instacart makes the money available, like, via a card that then that shopper uses at the physical point of sale. That business model wouldn’t exist without confidence that the technology that we provide is going to make that possible. Not that we didn’t, to be clear, you know, condense Instacart to create their business the way they did, but the idea became possible because of all this pre work that our industry had done to make that innovation possible. As you’re talking, I’m just thinking that what you have created enables entire segments, or potentially industries to function the way they do we do. And it’s not only on demand delivery and all of that different technology, but if you think about what’s happening now, that for a very long time, we’ve talked about how every device is a commerce device. That was actually something that when I was a lawyer, back when I was Ed McLaughlin’s lawyer that I mentioned earlier, he used to talk about that a lot. We’ve had various milestones over the years, like making that more and more the case more recently, what’s been really interesting to see is kind of the innovation that is tap on phone so we’re live with our tap on phone technology and more than 100 markets right now. So there’s sort of general tap on phone technology, tap to pay on iPhone, is something that you might hear Apple talk about in that way, because they’ve incorporated their own version of it into iPhone. But now anyone within iPhone, of course, of certain version number and release date, and also any Android phone, those phones, just by downloading an app, they become payment terminals. Think about how transformational that is and can be. You know, back in the day, in order to become emergent and, like, start selling things, not only was there the physical onboarding process and all of that, which, of course, there’s an onboarding process today, it’s just companies are capable of digitizing it. But in addition to that it was installing some serious hardware into a shop, basically for physical or, of course, there’s online onboarding into, you know, commerce platforms and the like. But in the physical world, it really was a really physical, hardware, intensive, expensive proposition. But now, any phone that’s contactless enabled, that’s again, after a certain release date, your phone, what’s in your pocket, can be turned into a payment acceptance. Terminal. It’s, I mean, it’s literally as easy as that. You could start like with square or stripe, or add in or and, you know, any other number of my partners who go out and deploy this technology, you can onboard in five minutes. I mean, it is the coolest thing. And then, if, now I’m out and about and my I often see it when I’m traveling. And if, like, if a car service picks me up. I was my family in Vail last year, and they come with a big suburban, or like, it fit the skis and all of that, and it’s a two and a half hour drive. And so we book it through a car service company. I was able to pay that driver just by tapping on a square, actually, application that they had on their phone. This was just this past February. Was the first time I used it in the wild. And now, even from the space of February through now, I’m seeing it everywhere. It’s just popping up everywhere it’s popping up. You know, in the enterprise context, where store associates are using it, kind of like a seamless, blind Buster type service, where the associates will be walking around the store, and they’ll notice that there’s a long line and that you’re ready to check out, and they say, Oh, if you’re paying with card, why don’t you check out right here with me? And that was in Sephora, and that’s super easy, and it’s transforming the way everyone is shopping and interacting with each other, and it’s also making it very easy and so much more possible for more businesses to accept payments in this new way. I mean, it’s totally transformative as a vendor. I was speaking at a conference I had published a book, and to sell the book of the conference, I needed to be able to take credit cards. I think it cost me $1,000 for the machine to sell, oh my gosh, $200 worth of books. It was just crazy. But the conference people expected me to be able to sell it. I needed to be able to not just take cash. It was a big money losing proposition, but as an author, it was just a capability I needed to have. And you probably felt like you had no choice. Yeah, yeah. I did feel like I had no choice, but now it is so easy.

Unknown Speaker 40:00
Yeah, like, yeah. And now I can do it on my phone to accept payments in any number of ways. Yeah, it’s, I mean, it is. It’s pretty amazing. And I have an account through one of the online classes that we offer. So it’s just on the platform. It all goes into something and then into my PayPal account. That’s right, it’s easy, yeah. And as a user, and you talk about offering training, but it’s a thing that we can figure out, speed, simplicity, convenience and sort of ease of use are only getting better and better and better with all of these technologies. All of the partners that I work with put so much focus on creating amazing, easy to use and then easy to understand, and thus easy to adopt consumer experiences. And I think that’s obviously helpful to scale as well when it’s very easy for people to get access and to understand the assignment. So as a business owner, this is crucial to the extent that you can share what next. So there’s a lot going on, a lot going on that’s next. I mean, in particular, in B to B, sticking with the business payments for a minute. You know, we’ve been talking up until now about how much progress there’s been on the consumer payment side, pretty much. And of course, everyone, the whole industry, focused there first. So there is a lot of opportunity to have similar innovation on the business side, payments in general, B to B type payments, invoice payments, things like that. So yes, we really help small businesses accept payments more easily and make payments. We have lots of different kinds of small business cards that have great value propositions, and they’re tokenized, and they’re put into various mobile payments platforms and all that’s great. Invoice payments are a different story. You know, the whole idea that there’s still arcane, ACH based payments, where reconciliation is really challenging, where insufficient funds are generally a problem, where also businesses aren’t earning the rewards or getting the rebate that they want. They may have a corporate card type spending program, but if they can’t use it, or if it’s not easy to use in whatever environments they need to pay. That’s really problematic. So one of the things that we’re thinking about, and one of the things I’m really excited about, is the opportunity through embedded finance and also just consumerizing a bit of how B to B commercial payments work, if you think about it, like the people who are in the office of the CFO or in the treasury department or in the procurement department, or if it’s just me, let’s say, buying lunch for my team or booking something and I’m supposed to use a P card like that should be easy and seamless, and it should be as wonderful of an experience as it is. If I were doing something for myself or my family with my personal card or my husband has a small business. He both invoices people and gets paid. He does it through a partner that I work with, and they do a good job, but he can’t pay every invoice the way that he wants to. You know, there are times when the companies that he’s working with they ask him to write a check, or they ask him to only pay by wire. That’s more challenging for him, because then it makes keeping his records more challenging, and it makes reconciliation and the data issues, etc. But there’s a whole ecosystem enablement thing that has to happen so similar to the way we made it possible for E commerce to work the way it did, the way contactless works, the way it does, the way P to P is possible. That is the innovation that’s starting to go on right now. On the B to B side, there is so much opportunity here, and I can’t give specifics just yet, but coming soon, over the next few months, actually, there are a few examples that are out there in the wild. I mean, just last week, one of our partners, brex, announced what they’re calling brex embedded, where we’re actually working with partners like brex to embed their payments capability. So they have, they’re an expense management solution, right? And you can basically through this technology that we’re working with them on, and they they use our back end to do some of this. You store what’s essentially a card number in a platform. So pretend you’re a travel agent, and you are booking travel through saber, and you need to pay airlines, hotels, rental car companies, cruise companies, etc. So now you can store your brex card, quote, unquote, in saber, and every time you go to pay one of those entities, it calls our system, and we send a virtual card directly, like in a straight through kind of way, to that end point. So the transactions happening on your chosen payment method, because people like brex, because they earn rewards on brex, also brex gives higher lines because of the way they underwrite. It’s just for the kinds of businesses that really like brex. They want to use brex, and they don’t want to use some sort of off cycle way of paying. So by working with brex, and, you know, various partners that have platforms that various kinds of businesses pay through, and bringing those things together, and embedding the technology, it’s making the entire thing more accessible, kind of bringing the payment to where those business.

Unknown Speaker 45:00
Are, where those people are, and then that’s one of the things that’s going to start enabling all of this to scale in a much bigger way. That example is really helpful. My final question is, then, with all of this enablement and technology change, I’m able to change my business model. I’m certainly able to manage my finances and cash flow very differently. What do you want to see from leaders of organizations so that your job is easier driving the change in the ecosystem, just being willing to think differently and just give some of these new things a try. Most of our partners are very open and honest with us, but the way that we come up with these ideas and strategies, we’re having many, many conversations with various partners around the ecosystem and the market. My team’s job, we engage with the largest digital partners and also other kind of ecosystem partners, and also the smallest like we might not manage startup accounts all the time, but we talk to them and we understand the disruption that’s happening as well. We marry that information, what we’re hearing from the market, the biggest players, the smallest players, with just what trends, of course, but then also what we’re hearing customers and partners want from us. So it’s not really different because our partners are doing it already, but more of that, more inbound to us, more conversations about what’s working, what’s not working. We always love feedback, but also, what can we do, and what could we build? And what can we build together to really fuel your growth? That’s always what’s top of mind for me and for the ecosystem partners that we work with, that they’ll be generous with their feedback and share with us what’s on their mind, and then we can be better partners that way. What do you expect from the leaders reporting to you if you were to pick one or two leadership qualities, say, I’m applying for a job with you? What would you want me to do or be that you would say, yes, absolutely. That’s a person who fits my team. That’s a really interesting question. I look for people that can connect the dots. I look for people that are always listening, but not just listening to themselves, or listening to kind of one channel, you know, on on Sirius, or on, you know, on the radio, listening to all of it, understanding the macro, understanding technology trends, understanding business trends and taking it all in and having lots of conversations with people internally externally, to just get a good idea of what people are looking for and kind of what’s happening in the subtext, because we always try to skate to where the puck is going. For sure, we definitely also look for people that are grounded in reality, but are willing to think a little bit outside the box about what’s possible, but also people that understand that not everyone is 20 steps ahead, so being able to bring people along and tell a story and and also understand the importance of data and how to come to the table prepared to back up What you’re back up both with customers and internally, right? It’s great to be a dreamer and have lots of good ideas, and you will get nowhere and not get them funded and not have anyone believe you if you can’t tell the story in a grounded, business case friendly way. So people on my team also are extremely grounded in that, and I look for leaders who can balance those things again, and who could bring people along, and also, obviously, who are good people and who are good motivators of the team, and who can really represent MasterCard in our innovative culture and working and developing leaders. The thing you’ve described is not an easy one to find, to be able to connect across, see the nuance six layers down and to be not arrogant, humility, kindness, emotionally intelligent, yeah, all of those things, the humility and kindness, we have something here that we have been talking about for many years, called the decency quotient at MasterCard, in general, we don’t really accept anything less. Not everyone who’s that cognitively high powered is also nice. That’s true, but you know, now we’ve evolved the decency quotient into actually a full blown strategy called the MasterCard way, and we actually spend a lot of time developing leaders according to this framework. It makes sense, because leaders are the fulcrum point, and having the wrong ones can be an energy drain, the pretty expensive one, for sure. This has been incredibly insightful. Thank you very much for the work you’re doing to make businesses like mine be much more successful. Oh, thank you. This was a lot of fun. Where would people learn more from you? I assume mastercard.com to learn more about MasterCard. So yes, on our website, of course, and our newsroom, and then I’m on LinkedIn, as you Google me, and I am really all over the place, but yeah, the MasterCard newsroom is the best. We put out really terrific content, and that’s where I would definitely direct people to go cool sherry. Thank you so much for your time.

Unknown Speaker 50:00
For the work you do and for sharing your leadership thoughts with our audience. Thank you. You

Unknown Speaker 50:25
give me a mountain with

Unknown Speaker 50:27
lots to do. Give me the sunshine. Give me a two. Give

Unknown Speaker 50:30
me something simple and true.

Unknown Speaker 50:33
All I need is sunshine.

Unknown Speaker 50:40
Yes,

Unknown Speaker 50:43
grab some friends and an Ice Cold Mountain Dew today. Mountain Dew

Unknown Speaker 50:49
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