Associate Consultant, Launch Program 2025 -Johannesburg South Africa at Mastercard

• 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.