Senior Vice President, Customer Solutions Center Lead, Africa at Mastercard

Key Responsibilities: 

Enable market strategy 

• Understands overall market strategy, industry trends, and customer needs for all segments in a given geography(s).
• Works with Division President to prioritize opportunities and develop initiatives across the geography(s) that support Mastercard’s growth and relevancy in the geography(s)
• Empowers Account Managers to farm and hunt by providing product & services expertise to the Account Management teams. Supports account planning, opportunity identification, and solutioning for frontline sales.
• Meets customers to understand their needs and supports on important pitches as needed. 
• Monitor utilization of products and platforms by our customers and identify opportunities for cross sell and upsell actions, both through bundling products into solutions as well as direct cross-selling. 
• Leverage Mastercard capabilities to translate market strategy into solutions.
• Responsible for developing solutions for customers across all of our products & services, working to break down silos across verticals and bring value to our customers through integrated solutions that meet their needs – balancing delivering scalable solutions with local relevancy.  
• Shares market & segment knowledge and future anticipated needs with Regional Product to help inform future product enhancements or new developments.
• Manages the capacity and focus of the Solution Architects (SA), Technical Architects (TA) and Product Specialists within the Customer Solutions Center (CSC) to ensure that each prioritized opportunity gets the right level of support it requires.
• Builds agile 'squads' for high or moderately complex opportunities/RFPs requiring multiple MA capabilities by staffing with the right resources:
• Identifies the right solutions architects, solution specialists and technical architects.
• Request resources from Regional Product Management teams or other customer solutions centers in case of missing expertise for a specific opportunity.
• Invites all enabling functions for support in solutioning in collaboration with Account Manager e.g. legal, finance etc.
• Works with regional product to understand the commercial & pricing models across our products & solutions and supports the SAs in developing the commercial propositions for complex solutions.
• Owns and monitors CSC performance metrics reports across the division, leveraging regional analytics team, to create awareness, prioritise and address risks and opportunities
• Tracks performance of agile 'squads' as well as resources in the Customer Solutions Center. Takes necessary actions to improve performance.
• Identifies gaps and requires additional investment in the customer solutions center based on evolving market needs – in collaboration with the relevant market heads and regional product/ services teams 

Enable knowledge and best practice sharing:

• Provides market intelligence and requirements to regional Product Management and Product Development teams along with their associated product specialists.
• Understands new products & capabilities working together with solution specialists to ensure that information is shared and utilized across all customer solutions center resources.
• Helps market development / segment heads with market intelligence and insights on demand for specific solutions across their segments.
• Shares best practices with other CSCs within and across the region to drive better customer experience and more relevant solutions.

Dual People Leadership

• CSC function typically has individuals with Dual (or matrix) management (employees with 2 people leaders) to increase alignment and collaboration across countries/markets and regional functions. CSC Lead will play a key leadership role in ensuring strong alignment & balance (markets vs function) around objectives/KPIs and necessary rigor around meaningful feedback conversations to support fair and robust performance reviews

Required Skills

• Strong understanding of industry trends and market intelligence.
• Good understanding of product technology and APIs.
• Good understanding of regionally relevant MA products, services, and solutions.
• Ability to link market developments to implications on MA products and services.
• Strong analytical and financial understanding.
• Proven ability to influence and motivate others to achieve objectives.
• High energy, strong people leadership, experience in leading diverse and cross functional teams.
• Strong interpersonal skills - the ability to build rapport and credibility quickly across functions.
• Strong negotiation skills with a proven track record in delivering commercial performance.
• Exceptional stakeholder management skills 

KPIs (AICP) – currently being reviewed 

• Revenues for supported geography
• Customer success metrics
• Increase in share of services revenues
• Product cross sell ratio 
• Deal win ratio for supported opportunities
• Voice of customer survey results
• Market specific objectives