Associate Consultant, Advisors Launch Graduate Program (Feb 2025)

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) 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?

2) Marketing Services

• 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 projects from any domain and build fundamental marketing and consulting toolkit.

3) Strategy & Transformation 

• Lead customers through sound decision making as they tackle strategic, tactical, operational, and transformational challenges, spanning across diverse topics including product, marketing, loyalty, innovation, and more. Apply a broad set of problem-solving techniques to improve overall performance and operations. 

• 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?

4) Performance Analytics: 

Translate data into insights leveraging Mastercard and client data. Get hands-on to design, implement & scale analytical solutions for clients across industries. Apply qualitative and quantitative analytical techniques using our enterprise applications (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, NiFi, Python, Impala, and more) to synthesize analyses into clear recommendations and impactful narratives. 

Sampling of questions we help our clients 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 client’s market share changing over time, and are there any segments where the client is relatively under penetrated? 
• Team members support several clients concurrently, and produce analyses at set cadences (i.e., weekly / monthly / quarterly reports) 

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 Masters degree with a target graduation date from 2024 Nov-Dec to 2025 Jan
• 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 Performance Analytics or Business Experimentation tracks).
• 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 where position is located, as well as eligible to apply for travel visas as required by travel needs.

Visa Sponsorship: Mastercard Australia cannot sponsor intern and full-time employment visas, and only candidates who possess full legal working rights in Australia will be considered (PRs & Citizens of AUS/NZ only).

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.