Company: Mastercard
Location: South Africa
Career Level: Associate
Industries: Banking, Insurance, Financial Services
Description
Our Purpose
Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we're helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.
Title and Summary
Associate Consultant Intern, 2025 - South Africa Associate Consultant Intern - 2025Internship Program
The Mastercard Internship Program offers penultimate year students an immersive experience to challenge the status quo, gain real work-life skills in a global company, drive decency and belonging, and grow their personal and professional development. We invite you to bring your passion, share your talent, and make the most of this truly priceless experience.
Services within Mastercard is responsible for acquiring, engaging, and retaining customers by managing fraud and risk, enhancing cybersecurity, and improving the digital payments experience. We provide value-added services and leverage expertise, data-driven insights, and execution.
Make an Impact as an Associate Consultant Intern
As an Associate Consultant Intern, you will collaborate within small teams to help some of the world's biggest brands answer and often implement solutions for their most challenging strategic questions. You will immediately create meaningful contributions through taking ownership of deliverables and building external relationships with clients. Focusing on technology and data, you will gain broad exposure to a range of industries, including financial services, retail, restaurants, hospitality and more.
As an Associate Consultant Intern, you will:
• Participate in volunteer and team building experiences
• Gain exposure to our leadership team through networking sessions and speaker series
• Begin to build relationships with clients to understand their business needs, seek strategic solutions and guide impactful decisions
• Grow by receiving hands-on mentorship from an experienced management team.
• Have an opportunity for meaningful contributions
• Collaborate with colleagues across different areas of the organization and gain exposure to business development, account management, and product management
We are looking for passionate and talented professionals, who share our vision for helping our customers with their most urgent business need. We are recruiting for 3 career tracks that make up our team:
Strategy & Transformation
Guide clients through strategic, tactical, operational, and transformational challenges to enhance performance and operations. Our engagements cover diverse areas, including product development, marketing, customer loyalty, and innovation. Working with clients from various industries, many S&T engagements directly interface with numerous Fortune 500 companies. This role aligns with the practices of traditional management consulting firms.
Sampling of questions we help our customers answer:
How can a global financial services institution be successful at entering a hyper competitive new market?
How can a customer improve its operating model to better achieve operational, financial and strategic goals?
Team members typically support 1-3 projects concurrently, with each project lasting for approximately 8-16 weeks.
Performance Analytics
Use quantitative and qualitative?skills and enterprise applications?(e.g., Business Intelligence Platforms, SQL, Python, and more) to drive data-led consulting solutions for customers.?Weave together vast amounts Mastercard, client & 3rd party data assets to?investigate trends, build propensity models, develop data visualizations, and synthesize millions of data points into a cohesive story. Engage with client stakeholders through virtual and in-person meetings, leveraging insights to inform strategic recommendations.
Sampling of questions we help our customers answer:
How does a financial institution's fraud/authorization metrics fare against competitors, and what are strategies that can help it be best-in-class?
How is a technology customer's market share changing over time, and are there any segments where the client is relatively under penetrated?
Team members support typically support several customers concurrently, and include both short and long term projects that can last anywhere from 4 weeks up to 1 year.
Marketing
Develop strategies and lead implementation of marketing campaigns and engagements; evaluate results to drive performance on behalf of Mastercard's clients. Provide deep direct marketing expertise across channels, leveraging customer, behavioral and transactional data and defining tangible results to both the client and Mastercard.
Sampling of questions we help our clients answer:
How does a fintech client optimize new customer acquisition and existing customers' life cycle value through effective targeting and communications?
How does a retail client drive foot traffic into store post-covid and/or optimize their ecommerce website to increase basket-size and average spend per customer?
How can a large financial institution best execute on a portfolio conversion – for example, after purchasing another issuer's portfolio – including components like internal and external communications, market launch, and more?
Team members typically support 1-3 projects from any domain and build fundamental marketing and consulting toolkit.
Bring your Passion and Expertise
We recruit for and value the following core competencies:
Passion: Actively seeks responsibility and takes pride in delivering the highest quality results and recommendations to our clients. Proven record of leadership in a work setting and/or through extracurricular activities.
Analytic Excellence: Demonstrates a strong aptitude for structured problem solving, analytical and quantitative skills. Experience using data analysis or querying tools (e.g., SQL, SAS, Excel or Tableau) is an asset (particularly for Performance Analytics or Business Experimentation tracks).
Business Interest: Clear interest in the world of business, and intuition for the way that companies make decisions.
Rapid Growth: Eagerness to learn quickly, both through Mastercard's structured training curriculum and organic development opportunities.
Teamwork: Willingness to work within small teams to produce outstanding deliverables, with a will to win attitude.
Integrity: Outstanding record of academic achievement. Commitment to Mastercard's values of honesty and integrity with a willingness to embrace and learn from mistakes.
Diverse Perspective: Brings a unique skillset or approach to the table in every client engagement or internal activity.
Communication: Ability to communicate complex ideas effectively. Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Qualifications:
To be available to work Full-time between approximately Mid June'25 to July'25.
To be a Penultimate Masters/Undergraduate Student, due to graduate no earlier than October 2025 Or Final year student as appropriate
Innovative thinking and thoughtful risk-taking.
Ability to partner across the organization.
Sound communication skills.
Citizenship Requirement: Applicants for this position must be a citizen of South Africa in order to be considered for this role.
Expert PC skills including proficiency in Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Access
In your cover letter, please indicate your first track preference. This information will be used to best match applicants with their desired tracks.
Track placement will indicate the types of projects where you will spend most of your time; however, we encourage and enable working across tracks to allow team members to acquire diverse skills and experiences.
To participate in our job simulation and experience what it's like to work as a Consultant at Mastercard visit: https://www.theforage.com/simulations/mastercard/advisors-client-services-xvlw
Corporate Security Responsibility
All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and, therefore, it is expected that every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must:
Abide by Mastercard's security policies and practices;
Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed;
Report any suspected information security violation or breach, and
Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard's guidelines.
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