Advisors Associate Consultant - Graduate Program (Feb 2025)

Our Purpose

We work to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments and businesses realize their greatest potential. 

Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. We cultivate a culture of inclusion for all employees that respects their individual strengths, views, and experiences. We believe that our differences enable us to be a better team – one that makes better decisions, drives innovation and delivers better business results. 

Overview

The Data & Services team is a key differentiator for Mastercard, providing cutting-edge services that help our customers grow. Focused on thinking big and scaling fast around the globe, this agile team is responsible for end-to-end solutions for a diverse global customer base. We combine traditional management consulting with our rich data assets and in-house technology to provide our clients with powerful strategic insights and recommendations. 

Make an Impact as an Associate Consultant

As an Associate Consultant, you will collaborate with exceptional colleagues to help some of the world's biggest brands answer their most challenging strategic questions. Working with 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, you will:

• Work on small teams to solve our clients' most challenging strategic problems
• Build strong relationships with clients to understand their business needs, find strategic solutions and guide impactful decisions
• Grow your career by receiving hands-on mentorship from an experienced management team
• Have an immediate opportunity for meaningful contributions, increased responsibility, leadership roles, and professional advancement
• Collaborate with colleagues across different areas of the organization and quickly gain exposure to business development, account management, and product management
• Receive extensive training focusing on helping you build your core consulting skill set.

We are looking for passionate and talented professionals, who share our vision for helping our customers with their most urgent business needs, and we are recruiting for 3 career tracks that make up our team:

1.) Strategy & Transformation 

Our Strategy and Transformation consultants lead clients through impactful decision making as they tackle strategic, tactical, operational, and transformational business challenges. They apply a broad set of problem-solving techniques to improve client’s overall strategy, performance, and operations.

Strategy and Transformation consultants answer questions like:

• A national retailer wants to enter a new country – what type of products should it offer, and which customers should it target to ensure successful expansion?
• Should a wealth management firm buy, build, or partner to expand into additional financial services?
• What strategy should postal operators follow to accelerate and maximize its support for financial inclusion and economic equity through offering digital financial services?

2.) Business Experimentation

Advise executives on business decisions by leveraging data and applying science to the way they run their business.  Using Mastercard’s industry-leading Predictive Analytics SaaS platform, Test & Learn®, you will work with customers to identify their key priorities and then design and run business experiments to establish which ideas work, where, when and how to deploy them, and what not to do. In working with customers this way, you get to understand the full range of their business, from new product launches, marketing, loyalty, and pricing, to operations and strategy.

Sampling of questions we help our customers answer:

• Where should a retailer open new stores to maximize profitability and minimize the cannibalization of nearby omnichannel sales?
• What bonus should be provided to someone opening a credit card account to entice them to use the card regularly?

3.) Marketing

Marketing consultants lead the strategy development and implementation of campaigns and engagements for clients. They use customer data to provide deep direct marketing expertise across channels, evaluating campaign results and adapting the approach to optimize marketing performance.

Marketing consultants answer questions like:

• How does a financial institution optimize new customer acquisition and existing customer’s life cycle value through targeted email campaigns?
• What is the right channel mix to engage potential customers when launching a new item at a quick service restaurant?
• What marketing collateral can a retailer use to drive online traffic, and increase spend per customer?

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.
• Analytic Excellence: Demonstrates a strong aptitude for structured problem solving and quantitative skills.
• 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: Commitment to Mastercard's values of honesty and integrity with a willingness to embrace and learn from our mistakes.
• Diverse Perspective: Brings a unique skillset or approach to the table in every client engagement or internal activity.
• Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with demonstrated leadership abilities.

Qualifications

• Bachelors or Master’s degree with a target graduation date between January 2024 and January 2025
• Outstanding record of academic achievement
• Proven record of leadership in a work setting and/or through extracurricular activities
• Exceptional analytical and quantitative problem-solving skills
• Experience using data analysis or querying tools (e.g., SQL, SAS, Excel or Tableau) is an asset (particularly for Business Experimentation track).
• Ability to communicate complex ideas effectively – both verbally and in writing – in English and the local office language(s)
• Candidates must be authorized to work in the country they are applying for a position in, as well as eligible to apply for travel visas as required by travel needs.

In your cover letter, please indicate your first and second track preference. This information will be leveraged to best match applicants with their desired tracks. 

Track placement will indicate the types of projects where you will spend the majority of your time, however, we encourage and enable working across tracks to allow team members to acquire a diverse set of skills and experiences.

Please note: that unfortunately, Mastercard does not sponsor immigration visas for graduate roles at this time. Please ensure that you have full working rights to qualify for this position (AU/NZ Permanent Residents & Citizens only).

Working at Mastercard

Our culture offers a world of Priceless possibilities. It’s a culture of purpose, belonging and knowing that the work you do matters. We cultivate an environment for all employees that respects their individual strengths, views and experiences. Mastercard was recently named number 20 in the top 100 graduate programs by GradAustralia, and number 5 in Technology companies. 

At Mastercard, you get flexibility and choice to meet your needs, and commitment to your personal and professional growth. It’s about bringing your authentic self to work.

Our benefits include:

• Hybrid work (i.e. 2office3home). Work where suits you and your team best.
• 'Work from elsewhere' or in one of our 210 offices worldwide for 4 weeks a year.
• Paid volunteering leave to make difference in your community.
• Access to wellbeing initiatives and counselling services to boost your mind, body, and spirit.
• We got you covered for health insurance, travel Insurance and accidental insurance.
• Resource and funding assistance for personal and professional growth.
• A generous and inclusive parental leave policy.

You can also join one of our business resource groups (BRGs) to connect with your colleagues and make a lasting impact in an area that you are passionate about!