Associate Consultant, Launch Program 2025 -Johannesburg South Africa

at  MasterCard

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.
Title and Summary
Associate Consultant, Launch Program 2025 -Johannesburg South Africa
Associate Consultant, Launch Program -2025
Mastercard Launch
Mastercard Launch is an 18-month global development program providing recent graduates with opportunities and exposure. You will not only enhance your professional growth and skills in a global setting, you’ll launch your Mastercard career.
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
As an Associate Consultant, 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.
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:
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 for start from 3rd March 2025
To be a Final Year Masters/Undergraduate Student or to have graduated no earlier than June 2024
Strong verbal and written communication skills
Analytical and problem-solving skills
Strong strategic and conceptual aptitude
Ability to multi-task and prioritize multiple projects concurrently
High-energy, can-do attitude, very strong sense of ownership and desire to succeed with commensurate analytical, technical, and strategic skills
Citizenship Requirement: Applicants for this position must be a citizen of South Africa in order to be considered for this role.
In your cover letter, please indicate your first track preference. This information will be leveraged to best match applicants with their desired track.
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.
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.

• 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