Building a culture of innovation

by. Les Matthews

In July at the TMG Customer Conference I had the opportunity and privilege to share my thoughts on innovation and digital commerce in the payments industry and since then I’ve participated on panels and done additional talks focused on the evolution of mobile and digital payments. As I’ve done these activities and connected with others in the payments community, one unexpected thing that has become evident is we still have a ways to go to in convincing our own community that the digital revolution is upon us.

This really hit home for me on a recent visit to one of our regional offices where I sat on an internal panel to discuss our digital commerce strategy. The questions and feedback I received proved that even within MasterCard, many of our own employees don’t yet understand the importance of digital; how it has the power to transform our industry and that it is critical to our success today. I decided that even with our mounting successes in the market, I had to take up the cause of turning each and every MasterCard employee into an ambassador of the digital revolution.

MasterCard is committed to building a secure, modular and differentiated digital payments platform that meets the needs of all players in the eco system. As a company we’re building our competencies and assets to reflect this commitment and we need to ensure that each and every employee can articulate the vision. Furthermore it’s important our employees are involved in shaping and driving our digital strategy and that they can live it through their work and when interacting with existing or prospective partners.

So how do we get our own people on board? That’s a question I’ve been mulling over recently and have come up with three keys to success that I plan to execute here at MasterCard.

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