MasterCard Reviews

Current Employee – been working at MasterCard

Pros – 1. If you are a hard worker, no need to worry about loosing your job ( It will never run out of business in the foreseeable future)
2. Lots of benefits for fulltimers

Cons – 1.Monotonous work
2.Lots of politics
3.Bureaucracy
4.Useless Management
5.Bunch of people to steel the credit for the work you did.

Advice to Senior Management – 1. Actively involve in the projects and know who is dong what.
2. Adapt good Software Development processes.
3. Dont just look for the outcome, look for how the team delivered that outcome.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at MasterCard

Pros – Exciting work, fast paced, nice work atmosphere, enjoy working with co-workers.

Cons – Some "old-time" MC management styles still exist.

Advice to Senior Management – - Continue to weed out "old-time" management style.
- While the company is doing great with Brand differentiation, perhaps you might consider using Technology (what we do very well) as a source of differentiation.

Current Employee – been working at MasterCard

Pros – professional environment
nice, polite culture
good pay

Cons – many layers, hard to get ahead, no clear career path, very very political, passive aggressive culture, ineffective HR department. horrible managers are tolerated for too long, should be quicker to fire people that do not perform or have numerous complaints filed agains them.

Advice to Senior Management – make the organization flatter so people feel empowered to make decisions! and get rid of ineffective managers.

Former Employee – worked at MasterCard

Pros – Flextime available. Hours are fair.

Cons – Too political. Friends hire friends. Very clicky. Hard to advance.

Advice to Senior Management – Provide more advancement opportunities. Promote from within.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at MasterCard

Pros – Good career & learning opportunities

Cons – Politics at each level of management is a blocking factor for career progression

Advice to Senior Management – right people are not always on the right place

Current Employee – been working at MasterCard

Pros – Compensation and flexibility is good

Cons – No Leadership, senior executive vision

Advice to Senior Management – Engage more with employees

Current Employee – been working at MasterCard

Pros – Work life balance, manageable job responsibilities

Cons – Limited career progression, very little feedback about how to improve performance

Advice to Senior Management – Create performance based promotion opportunities

Current Employee – been working at MasterCard

Pros – Golden Handcuffs - e.g., Thou shall be paid more, receive the sorts of bonuses and profit shares that are lied about elsewhere during interviews
Many job roles offer diverse approaches and methodologies, or interesting work
The company has a printing press in the basement with the now-organic global adoption of plastic and electronic payments in lieu of cash
Good reputation and cachet for a resume
Generally "nice" people
An opportunity for true greatness if the trajectory of the company can be altered to better fit the dynamicism of the future - This place CAN win, but isn't
Good Work-Life balance for most roles, especially for the competent
Recent words and inklings from senior folks offer glimmers of hope for long-term view beyond the current model

Cons – Golden Handcuffs - e.g., Thou shall find it difficult to duplicate your pay elsewhere even when taking a "Step up"
Addiction to core business model (the printing press, see Pros), while serious longer-term threats of disintermediation and displacement exist
Senior Management is woefully overrated, and are largely are a collection of Association-era dinosaurs and sclerotic banking vets. MasterCard is still a pasture for the empty suits.
Serious lack of effective innovation, and ridiculously poor integration of acquisitions - again, indicative of inability to operate outside of core franchise and processing competencies
Legal and overprotective turf warriors prevent any innovation, as does the lack of connection to end-consumers.
All of the traditional FI's and payments ecosystem players are losing out to agile and emerging channel players, and MasterCard is behind among that pack t that as a whole are behind.
Lacking junior resources; with a top-heavy "upside down pyramid" structure with decade-experienced professionals mired in cubicle city while window offices are occupied by folks with occassional good soundbytes at meetings but little else
Fear of Visa. The constant feeling of being Second or Third. An on the balance fear-based culture, with top-down dictums without coherent strategy, and reprisals for contrarianism
Over saturation of client-facing roles.
Recent actions don't match words of the "Powers That Be"

Advice to Senior Management – Two ways to approach this:

1) Remake the culture entirely into one of innovation with an "attack" mentality, rather than one focused upon reputational protectionism to a fault and "the old way" of doing things. Key to this, would be to build scale and network externality by offering some items free at high quality at the cost of medium term profits. But, value would be created by new offerings that . STOP LOOKING AT THE SHARE OF A TRANSACTION for everything. With scale, value is created, even from that which is "free" - See the biggest .com and mobile successes

2) Alternatively strip it down. Let's be fair: half the employees in Purchase aren't even needed to support the core business model, so devote oneself to it, maximize margins, and then work to partner / acquire / merge with a "new" player in emerging payments who do all the innovation better than we. This longer-term allows us to "go for the kill",. and has greater chance of success than option 1 of trying to win the way we have always crippled by terrible innovation culture and dubious effectiveness of most senior managements and entire functional areas.

Former Employee – worked at MasterCard

Pros – Good benefits, comfortable workplace, nice people

Cons – In the suburbs, your fate is completely reliant on your manager and there are some truly inept managers, as with other companies. not much room for growth or movement right now.

Advice to Senior Management – Get a better handle on some of the veteran MC management and start cleaning shop; you have a lot of talent and people with drive who are held back due to their incompetent and retaliatory managers.

Former Employee – worked at MasterCard

Pros – Campus type atmosphere, successful business model, strong employee base

Cons – Little opportunity for advancement, promotion within your role is impossible

Advice to Senior Management – Stock for all employees who rate highly at year end