May 7, 2025
[Full Podcast transcript at end of page]
When we sat down with Maja Lapcevic, it was clear within the first five minutes: this wasn’t going to be an episode filled with vague platitudes about “culture” or “collaboration.”
Instead, we got a tactical, inside look at how one of the world’s most respected financial services brands is quietly building real innovation infrastructure—with the discipline and velocity most companies only dream of.
Maja has held senior innovation roles across Citi and Mastercard. Today, she leads brand platform innovation inside Mastercard’s global Brand and Integrated Marketing Communications group. She also plays a key role inside Mastercard Foundry, one of the most sophisticated corporate venture and product development teams we’ve seen anywhere.
The result? A candid, concrete conversation on what real innovation looks like inside a large, regulated company—and how to build the systems and partnerships that help you do it consistently.
Here’s what stood out.
A lot of companies say they’re “innovative.” Very few can point to a live dashboard that tracks the performance of every project across materiality, velocity, and quality.
That’s what Mastercard built.
Using a framework called Studio, Maja and her colleagues evaluate every innovation initiative by asking:
This level of rigor matters. As Maja put it, “Despite having a great framework, we’re still susceptible to pet projects. We do have zombie projects.” What changes the game is transparency—and tooling that keeps leaders accountable to the truth, not just the narrative.
It’s a reminder that the discipline of shutting things down is as important as the creativity that starts them.
When we asked how Mastercard has built such strong co-development partnerships with startups, Maja didn’t talk about pitch days or shiny demo rooms. She talked about legal contracts.
The backend innovation they’ve done—standardized onboarding, leaner legal processes, risk-adjusted compliance—has allowed them to shrink pilot timelines to 4–6 weeks. That’s exceptional by enterprise standards.
Too many organizations want to move fast on the front end, but never fix what’s slowing them down behind the scenes.
Lesson: if you want to partner like a startup, you have to operationalize like one.
One of our favorite moments in the episode was when we asked Maja, “What do startups want most from Mastercard—your customers or your data?”
Her answer: “Usually customers. But they know the rules.”
Mastercard has built its reputation on trust. That means strict privacy and data-sharing protocols, especially when working with new partners.
But what’s interesting is how this trusted reputation actually enhances their ability to innovate. Startups get access to customers. Customers engage more because Mastercard is behind it. That trust becomes a force multiplier.
It’s a lesson for every corporate brand: innovation is impossible without trust. And trust is earned by doing the boring, necessary things right.
Mastercard isn’t a consumer brand in the traditional sense. They’re B2B2C. That means every new product or platform has to be sold into a business (usually a bank, fintech, or merchant), but validated with a consumer.
It creates complexity—and a longer funnel—but also real discipline.
Maja walked us through how they handle this:
That customer-first mindset was present throughout the conversation. Even when the Foundry builds something new, they’re co-developing alongside the business units—never in isolation.
A lot of corporates have built innovation labs that become organizational orphans—too distant from the business to have real impact, too caught up in optics to deliver outcomes.
Mastercard took a different approach.
Their innovation teams are embedded in the business. Foundry exists to de-risk opportunities with business units, not for them. They co-fund projects. They co-own the early validation. But they’re not competing for the P&L.
This unlocks something powerful: a system where product teams can run fast experiments without risking the business unit’s balance sheet.
As Maja put it, “We never claim to be the future P&L owner. That also really helps the relationship upfront because there’s no competition.”
That alignment is rare—and it shows.
One of the last topics we explored was how the Foundry team earns the trust of internal business leaders.
Maja’s answer was simple but spot-on: start with quick wins.
Before you pitch a big bet, show that you can help a business unit succeed—fast. Then use that trust to co-develop bigger initiatives, like Mastercard Move, the company’s new cross-border payments network.
That win was co-developed across three different business units. The Foundry played a critical role in validating the opportunity and accelerating the work—but the business units helped drive the strategy.
Trust is built through results, not evangelism.
A lot of innovation leaders talk about “maturing the system.” Maja Lapcevic and her team at Mastercard have actually done it.
They’ve moved beyond innovation theater. They’ve built a scalable operating model. And they’ve found ways to balance the creativity of R&D with the accountability of commercialization.
For anyone working inside a corporate—or partnering with one—this episode is a reminder that you don’t have to choose between speed and structure. If you build it right, you can have both.
- Ben and Marcus
Ben Yoskovitz 00:00
When you do pilots, let's say, with startups or other partners, how are you measuring success failure of those things? At
Maja Lapcevic 00:08
MasterCard, we have a framework called studio, which is based on Lean product design. So every initiative that we look at is always going to be first and foremost addressing a very material opportunity space that's strategically aligned to what we want to do, where we work. You know, we're continuously leveraging kind of experimentation to really determine, is there true desirability? Is it actually feasible for us put that into market? That's when we're looking at who do we partner with, do we decide to build? Do we partner with an external entity? And then also, is this really viable for us? And that goes through the various kind of testing cycles, as you traditionally would in Lean we do have zombie projects, but what we've been what we then stated, now one of my colleagues who manages that transformation effort is a tool that is now tracking across those metrics of kind of materiality, velocity and quality of a product, So that at a push of a button, our leadership has visibility into their portfolio metrics that are reviewed at a quarterly basis, which will ultimately, I think, get to us killing things a lot faster and putting those zombie projects To that Maya,
Ben Yoskovitz 01:21
thank you for being on the board. On the podcast. It's great to see you. You and I met back. I actually went and looked this up back in 2020 so it's been five years, and we had the opportunity to work together. Highline beta facilitated a number of workshops on growth, innovation, lean methodology and other other things with MasterCard, and that was amazing. And I I remember being really impressed by the sophistication of MasterCards innovation system, sort of the training, the facilitation, the venture building that you were doing. I remember getting a tour of some facilities and being like, there's a lot of cool stuff going on here. I know that was a long time ago. I'm sure a lot has happened since then, so I'm excited to jump into that and get started. So first question, I know you actually recently, about six months ago, changed roles. So curious about what you're focused on today.
Maja Lapcevic 02:12
Thanks for having me first and foremost. And really lovely to reconnect. So yes, about six months ago, I changed roles. In my previous role, I was developing new product development as part of MasterCard foundry, working mostly in areas like real time payments cross border, data and services. And now my new role is brand innovation and insights team, leading brand platform innovation. So developing direct to consumer, direct to small business or business capabilities to really help differentiate our brand and also then to fuel our products and services.
Marcus Daniels 02:47
What has changed the most? I guess, obviously, it's been six months now in this new role, but reflecting on how the organization has also changed its approach to innovation,
Maja Lapcevic 02:56
well, I don't think that the role of innovation has changed. It was a maybe a realization that the world of marketing has changed. So marketing, as you may be aware, over the last decade, you know, we've seen a lot of convergence between just traditional kind of advertising. We're living in an economy that is really focused. We call it the experience or the attention economy, where kind of traditional advertising no longer breaks through, and so that, coupled with the realization that marketing technology is also converging with ad tech, has led us, and now even more so commerce, has led us to this kind of new realization that we really need to be thinking through about, how Do we break through as a company? People will value experiences a lot more than just things. That basically became our first brand play, where we developed our priceless platform that connects consumers to their passions and experiences. And so now this is the next evolution of that
Ben Yoskovitz 03:57
and and do you would you say that most of your time is spent. Is it venture building? Is it partnerships? Is it how do you look at combinations? It's a combination. Okay, so you're doing, you're doing all the things. Yeah,
Maja Lapcevic 04:10
yes. I mean, I think at MasterCard one, we're also, uh, smart enough to realize that we're not always the smartest people in the room, and that we need to really build kind of together with other great entrepreneurs and thought leaders. For that reason, we invested in a program called start, start path that sources from around the world, you know, hundreds of startups that have a commercial connection to our business and to our customers businesses. We've been doing that across fields like payments and security and identity for years, as the world now is moving with AI, we're also looking at kind of new capabilities for that are horizontal across all of our units, including the brand and integrated marketing communications function as well.
Marcus Daniels 04:54
So a real balance in between core innovation and beyond the core are you seeing? Momentum with kind of the international outreach to do pilots with startups.
Maja Lapcevic 05:04
I don't know if I see more momentum. I think that that was an always on kind of activity for us. And we've definitely seen, over the last like seven years, our main customers, you know, whether it's banks, issuers and fintechs, just realize that, you know, it's collaboration that's going to be the winning formula. And so I would say it's just a continuation. You know, I think when we first started working with startups, a lot of it was about signal spotting, and then it converted into kind of, how do we create mutually beneficial commercial arrangements, where the startup has an asset that we need or customers need, and how do we co develop things together? And then now I feel like it's now reverted, again to even more of a balance, because we're still doing those commercial things with fintechs. But at the same time, given the pace of change and the rate of adoption, we created a new horizon three venture fund that's really focused on just helping us discern, you know, where's the world going as we think about kind of new capabilities, and agentic commerce, for example, is just one element. Like, how do we really have a seat at the table and really understand kind of the insights that are coming out of that
Ben Yoskovitz 06:15
space? And so a couple of, couple of things there, but maybe just on the horizon three venture fund side of things. I know that's not necessarily, you know that's not your role. But what stage of company are you investing in? How are you looking at the relationship there? Does it have to be a commercial deal in place for that to work? So what's the strategy that you're you're seeing play out there, I think
Maja Lapcevic 06:41
it's, it's a similar strategy to as you would see it in a corporate venture, in the sense that we are looking at areas that are important to MasterCard and MasterCard future, so that there is a strategic tie back. And we do that by collaborating with our business units to understand the areas that are most important that where we either see potential future disruption or opportunity. And so it is very much kind of that corporate venture model. We're looking at companies that have a product so, like series, a typically and beyond,
Ben Yoskovitz 07:12
got it. And if I can one other thing, you use the term agent, tech commerce, what are we talking I mean? I understand, you know, I understand AI. That sounds like, like a like, I'm a genius or something. But you know what? What is agentic commerce and how are, how are you specifically thinking about all the change with with AI?
Maja Lapcevic 07:34
So we know that everyone is on an AI journey, right? If I had that answer, I would probably be a lot wealthier than I am today. But the things that we do know is that the world that we will soon live in will be a hybrid world, right? It's going to be a world filled with humans and with agents representing not only us as individuals, but brands, retailers, media and all of these kind of the new agent, I would say, economy will need to have ways to engage, emote, transact, understand, perceive and execute, whether it's going to be semi autonomously or eventually autonomous, autonomously on your behalf. And that will massively, I would say, change the world of commerce, especially if you think about those, things will also need to happen all in real time,
Ben Yoskovitz 08:25
right? So you're talking about agents. I mean, if I you like, like, agents buying stuff on our behalf,
Maja Lapcevic 08:32
yeah. I mean, the agent economy, a potential part of it is shopping, right? But then there's the other, all the other aspects of improving productivity, managing things on your behalf, as your assistant, et cetera, et cetera.
Marcus Daniels 08:46
You mentioned a bit about a balance of CO development in kind of the approaches. What is your advice on really unlocking some of these blockers that people don't take that journey in CO development, we've seen this in a lot of different FIS, having challenges to get to that stage. And it seems like you've been able to get to a stage. We have a nice portfolio approach of innovation projects.
Maja Lapcevic 09:08
Yes, I mean, when I specifically talk about, how do we partner with external startups or parties, you know, the most important thing, and that this is not just at MasterCard, but my experience back, you know, at Citi and other places, which is just the ability to innovate together, which often, if you're working in a highly regulated industry, you have to deal with things like very long onboarding cycles, legal contracts. And so through the star PATH program, because it is so tied to the business, we've been able to create much shorter cycles so that you can really quickly onboard and legally work with us for this purpose of innovation and POCs and testing. So I think that was a massive, let's just say, back end capability that's fueled our ability to move faster.
Marcus Daniels 09:56
That's fantastic. How short Have you been able to kind of truncate those cycle. Was four to six weeks. Oh, fantastic.
Ben Yoskovitz 10:02
Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. And then, and then, when you do pilots, let's say, with startups or other partners, how are you measuring success failure of those things? How do you decide what to double down on not double down on, because not every pilot is going to work. So what does that look like, and maybe it's a little bit of the how do you MasterCard handle the inevitability of failure in some of these innovation efforts that we're you know, we put ourselves into.
Maja Lapcevic 10:32
So at MasterCard, we have a framework called studio, which is based on Lean product design. So every initiative that we look at is always going to be first and foremost, addressing a very material opportunity space that's strategically aligned to what we want to do or where we where we work. You know, we are continuously, you know, leveraging kind of experimentation to really determine, is there true desirability? Is the is the is it actually feasible for us put that into market? That's when we're looking at, who do we partner with, do we decide to build? Do we partner with an external entity? And then also, is this really viable for them, for us? And that goes through the various kind of testing cycles, as you traditionally would in Lean I think areas of opportunity for us could definitely be, you know, shutting things down faster. You know, despite having this great framework, you know, we are still susceptible to this is a pet project that someone really loves, so we'll fuel it and continue it. We will. We do have zombie projects, but what we've been, what we've been stated now, one of my colleagues who manages that transformation effort is is a tool that is now tracking across those metrics of kind of materiality, velocity and quality of a product, so that at a push of a button, our leadership has visibility into their portfolio metrics that are reviewed at a quarterly basis, which will ultimately, I Think, get to us killing things a lot faster and putting those zombie projects to bed. Okay?
Ben Yoskovitz 12:05
So harder to stay committed to my pet project when the dashboard is available to everybody and they can see my pet project isn't working, that's right, yeah,
Maja Lapcevic 12:19
it's you have to take data to drive those decisions.
Ben Yoskovitz 12:21
Sometimes, yeah, do you think everybody's on board with that idea? Like, does everybody like, Yes, please. More data, more transparency. Or people like, oh, I don't really want to look, you know, under the hood, or find where the skeletons are buried. I think
Maja Lapcevic 12:35
everyone is on board, and whether they are or not the way that we have architected the solution. First and foremost, it's something that our board has been presented with. So they are also asking us for that, because they're also asking us, you know, what's in your pipeline for growth? So this is going to give them full visibility into that, but we've actually embedded the tool into the actual product development process, so that you're required to leverage tools like AHA and our product catalog from the very moment you have an idea, Inception, and as you progress through the different phases of product development and commercialization,
Ben Yoskovitz 13:13
right? So you sort of have no choice but to track things, let's say honestly, because otherwise, you know, a project with no data at all, it's just people are gonna be like, well, you're just not following the process so and you would never be able to progress exactly. You can't get through the stage gates. Yeah,
Marcus Daniels 13:30
it's always the balance, as we know, too, especially at these projects at such an early stage. I mean, there's the science and the data, and there's also kind of the qualitative measures too. But I think it's great that, as you said, if you don't, if you don't track anything, clearly, there's not much momentum happening there. Maybe we should just zoom out a little bit. I mean, you had a lot of success at MasterCard, just from an organizational level. How was really innovation structured at MasterCard?
Maja Lapcevic 13:53
Well, first and foremost, the the notion of innovation is not something that sits in one place. And I think that's super important, because whether you're working on, you know, innovation for today, or innovation for kind of tomorrow or horizon three, we really do believe fundamentally that it is truly everyone's role. And while we have pockets where the capabilities of innovation are managed, like in MasterCard foundry, where I sit, or in other parts of the organization, like the brand innovation and insights team or our AI Center of Excellence, it's to create the tools and the capabilities and the skills so that the whole company can innovate. It's super important for us one because we know that in order to be relevant tomorrow, we have to attract the best talent. The best talent will only come to us if they're working with modern tools, right? Nobody wants to come and work with outdated tools. They want to know that they're in a company that is really investing in innovation. And so, you know, we have a number of places where we provide like tools, like design systems or cloud capabilities or workbenches, but that's really for. Or the greater mission so that the whole company can actually innovate, right?
Ben Yoskovitz 15:03
And then h3 lives it with the foundry. Is that? Is that? Yes, okay, so
Maja Lapcevic 15:10
horizon three, Horizon three, and our actual studio for building new products, lives with a foundry. But our model is very much a collaborative model where, you know, we act as a service to our businesses, so we're very much tied to what is their strategic focus are we take a portfolio approach so that we're balancing near term innovation as well as further out innovation. That's also really important for us as an organization, because when, obviously, times are tight, or you need to show real kind of in your returns, you're able to dial back thanks, while not completely defunding, kind of the risks and the learning that you have to put in place for Horizon three,
Marcus Daniels 15:53
right? And do you feel like this moment in time with AI? Is it really time going on the offense, and you're spending a lot more time taking more, bolder approaches and building out these capabilities, or just what's the orientation right now,
Maja Lapcevic 16:06
I think it's still the relatively same mix. I would say that, you know, the fact that we created a horizon three fund, I think it was like two years ago, just demonstrates the need to kind of be focused more in that space. But I would say that our kind of the mix of the portfolios are still the same. I think we've only made, like, one or two investments in the horizon, three funds so far, and it's more about learning at this stage,
16:31
learning and insights.
Maja Lapcevic 16:33
Yeah, exactly. How about you guys? What are you seeing with the clients that you're working with? What are the different approaches that they're taking.
Marcus Daniels 16:41
Yeah, I mean, I think it's super interesting, because you're seeing a lot of focus still in digital transformation, closer to the core AI budgets and initiatives, but we are seeing a new wave of organizations who are taking bolder approaches. That's kind of why I was also kind of trying to get a sense of what was the temperature like that are really looking at, I would say more like h2 kind of initiatives. Some might have cvcs that are, you know, looking like you described, and making bets in the h3 world, but things that are a bit more actionable. You know, that's why, you know, piloting and having these different interfaces at different stages becomes so critical, and taking that portfolio approach that you described. But even with all the kind of the macro turmoil right now, we do see a lot of appetite to go on the offense
Maja Lapcevic 17:29
interesting, like, what can you cite any of those? Or, like, what exactly they're doing that's different?
Marcus Daniels 17:34
Yeah, we've seen it in different industries, in different GEOS as well. Typically, it's come down to CEOs leadership and kind of boldness based on where they stood, standing on the agenda of innovation, that being such a, you know, strategic component of growth, you know, and I think that's, again, it's everything's happening so quickly now. And you mentioned, I think, a really important point of having always the cutting edge tools to attract talent and really connect different parts of the business. And I think, you know, people can cut through some of the noise of what's real and what's not real, and sometimes you have to make some bold stance also to attract great talent to want to work within and partner within. So I think it also has an external kind of brand equity perspective too. I know. Ben, do you have anything you want to add to that?
Ben Yoskovitz 18:24
Yeah, I think what, what we see, I mean, of course, it's, it's across the board. I think you're, we're in a sort of time where, you know, some companies are literally shutting down their innovation to, like, you know, shutting down that age three kind of thing, and, like, no, no retrench. And others are doubling down the other way. And the model that we're the most excited about, because I think it aligns with how we think about stuff, is the venture studio model. So it's a it's a corporate saying, let's go build ventures, not necessarily spin them out, per se, but let's go build ventures, you know, literally beyond our core that should have strategic value back to our core business, but aren't necessarily connected to a business unit. They might be servicing the same customer, but in a different way, or a different customer. So, you know, we're seeing those examples like working with 1848 ventures, which is a venture studio that does B to B SAS, around AI, so B to B, SAS, but they're there. They were created by Westfield insurance. So it's an insurance company that said, we want to go support our customers and different types of customers in a different way, by building solving new problems, basically. So that model is interesting for us as venture builders and venture investors who are looking for strategic value from the core, but, but in that h2 to h3 window,
Maja Lapcevic 19:47
yeah, that's super exciting. I think that's something that we have not yet explored as a as a kind of an approach, which, to be honest with you, I think it probably the timing right now is better to revisit to your point. Yeah.
Ben Yoskovitz 19:59
Yeah, I think it's, again, we see some companies that are interested in that others that are not. I think the balance between, sort of beyond the core growth type stuff and core incremental innovation, you know, which is, of course, super important. I think a lot of companies genuinely struggle with that balance. They just, of course, they focus primarily on the core stuff. But in my experience, when they shut down the growth stuff, they're doing themselves a disservice. I think, I think it sounds to me like MasterCard is consistently attempting to do both all the time, probably dialing up a little bit one way, dialing down another way. But it sounds like you've managed to maintain some consistency and not do that sort of we're gonna do. We're all in on this crazy innovation. No, we're not all you know and that sort of back and forth.
Maja Lapcevic 20:52
No, definitely, like an example of us kind of just moving beyond the core is last year I collaborated with our commercial and transfer Solutions team. And if you think about us, our core business, right, which many of you probably know, is like our card business, right? That's what MasterCard, because your consumers know us, but increasingly our businesses in the commercial servicing bees. So we launched a new network for cross border, for kind of the B to B space. So that's just an example of a kind of big growth bet that we made.
Marcus Daniels 21:24
Yeah. The other thing you mentioned earlier about getting faster at killing initiatives or certain co builds, we're also seeing an approach of maybe spitting out some of those opportunities. Maybe that's the right outcome, opposed to just purely killing it. How do you leverage the asset on the outside, or find some way to divest it, but still get some insights? And so, you know, that's also another hybrid way that it doesn't have to get down to age three or as robust as building a corporate venture studio, but we've seen that lately even becoming an interesting way to really tack tap into external talent, but also keep talent that's going to leave still within the ecosystem of the organization.
Maja Lapcevic 22:06
Yeah, I think we've not I think we had one investment that was in the data space, but we did it together with IBM. That was that type of effort, but it didn't start as an internal project. It started more as a partnership. I think for us, probably why it's been difficult to work in the space is that we take data privacy and data we have a lot of on soil data requirements that are very make it very difficult for us to kind of look at things like spin outs or kind of the venture building approach, right? Versus potentially other industries.
Ben Yoskovitz 22:41
Do you do when you work with startups? Because that's that's they're on the outside, is there is their first ask? Can you give us all your data, or is their first app? Can you give us all your customers? Because you have tons of both. So which one do startups ask for the most?
Maja Lapcevic 22:58
Usually, when we work with startups, particularly in the Start PATH program, it's because we are helping them scale through our network so that they can access our customer base. And therefore they're coming in and they're abiding by the security requirements that we maintain. And so of course, they would love to have our data, meaning everyone wants to collaborate in this new world, right with data in a safe way, but we very much stay true to those kind of privacy principles that we have, and increasingly, we're experimenting with privacy enhancing technologies that would enable us to kind of collaborate and share data in a way that would never move or kind of be de anonymized. How do
Marcus Daniels 23:46
you really measure the success in between these different horizons and kind of managing innovation on the core and this balanced approach with on the outside? Do you have any advice, or has that changed over time for you?
Maja Lapcevic 23:57
I think so. The principles that we brought into our portfolio, and Ken Moore, who leads our you know, it's our chief innovation officer. He'll often speak about the balance between creativity and commerciality without commerciality. That's when you see a lot of like venture studios, or kind of the kind of innovation units really fold if you over rotate on just creativity and looking at Horizon three and things like that. So for us, materialities is the first thing that we have to demonstrate when we're creating the business case, the opportunity, and then we have to demonstrate throughout the kind of testing cycle, why do we continue to feel confident that this is going to be viable for us, otherwise it doesn't just move forward? Yeah, so that's that would probably be the biggest thing.
Ben Yoskovitz 24:43
What is it, Maya, what is a, just to get tactical, what is a testing cycle? I'm sure it varies. But what does that look like? Is that a week of rapid prototyping is that, you know, a year of testing in live with customers and and how does that speak? To like materiality makes sense to me. But what are the thresholds for that? Is it? Oh, we can. We can make an argument that this will generate X dollars for the business or save y dollars, or, I'm curious about that sort of testing process, materiality,
Maja Lapcevic 25:17
we don't really focus on the cost saves. That's probably done in another part of the business that's focusing on transfer. On transformation. For us, it's in foundry, at least working with our business units. It's all about net new growth. So the threshold for a net new initiative is at least a $50 million opportunity in year three. And so, you know, that's what we're looking at, because of the size of our business, you know, and then we and then, of course, the experimentation really depends. Are you doing a direct to consumer? Are you doing a B to B play, getting access, as you know, to B to B customers takes sometimes a lot longer, and that will slow us down a bit. But, you know, we very much have a kind of prototype to learn approach, which is multiple different types of experiments, but again, making sure that we're doing that with our customers. And so the sometimes, what takes the longest is just making sure we're getting in front of our customers and making sure that we also have the right customer who can also innovate with us and our timelines. That's, I think, an opportunity for, I would say, the whole industry, to think through. I
Marcus Daniels 26:25
think where a lot of folks have failed is getting those business cases done quickly. It seems like you've been able to get to materiality quicker. Do you have any advice for leaders on how to even get those business cases done faster, or any hacks, from
Maja Lapcevic 26:42
what I've learned from just the cold whole startup ecosystem, you know, sometimes you, in the beginning, you're just doing back of the envelope calculations, right? What's your total addressable problem? And then as you start refining your concepts, starting to make the assumptions, and then throughout that product development process, really de risking and validating, like, is this truly viable? What's it going to cost for us to bring this to market? Do we have the right sales teams, distribution channels, and increasingly, as we start moving into kind of that B to B space, we don't traditionally have those distribution channels right, and we don't want to have that old world kind of one to one relationship sale model. So I think those are new muscles for us that we're building as well. But, yeah, that's, that's kind of how we're thinking about things.
Marcus Daniels 27:25
Fantastic. I know you've also done some work sitting on kind of startup boards. What advice would you have for kind of startup founders trying to engage with MasterCard?
Maja Lapcevic 27:36
I mean, I would say, like all corporates, you know, there are certain expectations that a corporate has when you're dealing with them. And my first, I would say, lesson to them is one of patience, because, as you know, selling into a large corporation is typically a longer sales cycle than if you're just putting something in the market and you want to see how you get feedback. So patience really understanding that, you know, the people that you're dealing with, the security that is in place is because we want to maintain that trust right with our ultimately end customers, and that we've spent decades to build so kind of having that grown up understanding of why certain things exist also is really important. Got it and
Ben Yoskovitz 28:22
on that. You know? Back to the business case, what? What's the, what's the level of evidence that you need to say, this is a 50. We'll just use 50 as the number, right? This is $50 million in three years we should invest in this thing, whatever this thing is, what's the level of confidence or evidence that you need? And maybe it's different for B to C and B to B. You know how, like, Have you tested it in market? Is it live? Is it generating revenue for you? Like, how much confidence is needed for you to be able to get in front of leadership and say, We've got to make this bet?
Maja Lapcevic 28:58
So when we're doing, typically, in, like, our prototyping phase, we're doing a number of different experiments right where we're not only doing kind of pricing analysis to understand kind of where would we price this in the market based on, like landscape research and inferring from existing solutions, but then we will directly engage with potential kind of customer targets to determine a price range and to determine an actual willingness to pay. And some of the key kind of markers that we need to have is we need to before we decide that we're going to commercialize something, we need to have customers that are going into market with us and are signing actual agreements with us. So at least two customers right are signing up for a service at a certain cost, and that's giving us indication, not just the conversations we're having, but they're actually taking those steps to do
Ben Yoskovitz 29:50
so, right? So you're securing customers, you know, maybe it's through loi, or maybe it's like an actual contract of we're delivering this, you customer. Will cancel. It's a contract, and you're targeting at least that's is that more on the enterprise side or even on the SMB side you're like, at minimum, we need two to give us the confidence that that price times that customer times that number of customers that look like. That gives us a market
Maja Lapcevic 30:16
Yeah, in terms of market test partners or customers, we need at least two to move into that phase, assigning customers that are paying customers,
Ben Yoskovitz 30:26
right, right. Got it. And is there a favorite sort of fast test that you because you, I know you do a lot of prototyping experimentation. Is there one that you've said, we always use the landing page. We always use the false. We always use this because it consistently gives us data, qualitative and quantitative that we value.
Maja Lapcevic 30:50
I mean, I would say, if it's a consumer offering, the landing page has been the most, you know, quickest right determinant of demand. But to get to the answer around willingness to pay and kind of over the line for us, because we are typically a B to B to C Company, even though we're always testing for the little c is, you know, getting that customer, which is typically just a lot of sales conversations, to get them to sign up. And that's where the funnel is long,
Ben Yoskovitz 31:18
right? So, and, but that's an interesting point, because you're B to B to C. So you're doing a lot of consumer testing to validate if the end consumer is interested in in the value proposition or what have you. But ultimately, then you have to sell that through, more often than not, into a business. So it's B to B sales, sales calls, after you've done you know that rapid consumer, scrappy, rapid consumer testing that's right
Maja Lapcevic 31:45
like now we have a beta that's live. It's a small business AI assistant. We're evolving it, and it's exactly that we know that we need to demonstrate that the small business needs and wants this. We use that data to demonstrate to our customers, who will ultimately be the paying customers for this, so that they understand that their customers will want it, but then it's a sales cycle with them and understanding like, what's their environment, what's their kind of appetite,
Ben Yoskovitz 32:12
right? Do you do a lot of the consumer testing on brand so consumer knows it's MasterCard, or do you do a lot of it off?
Maja Lapcevic 32:19
Not always both, both, sometimes on, sometimes off. I think what we've learned through our testing, though, is when we we present a solution because we also want it to be off brand, just to understand, like, what's the, you know, independent view? But a lot of what we are is a company that, you know, provides security solutions, that provides trust. The nature of our franchise is really about maintaining that balance, you know, between merchants, issuers, consumers, even our commercial network is as well. And so for us, we've seen through testing that, you know, our brand really drives a lot of preference.
Ben Yoskovitz 32:59
Yeah, we've, done a lot of testing in the past where we'll start off brand for a customer, just so that we have complete control over it. They don't get nervous about legal compliance, any of those things. And you get sort of conversion data, let's say, on something consumer, whether it's an ad or a landing page or what have you, and then you put it on brand, and the numbers usually go up if that brand is well known but also trusted, and that trust drives increased conversion. So you probably see a similar pattern,
Maja Lapcevic 33:34
absolutely, especially now with some of these AI solutions, right? People are still unclear with how their data is being used. They don't trust AI, but a lot of times, you know, a larger kind of entity, which is also why it's riskier and why we need to make sure that we're doing things properly. You know, they have more trust, right? Working with someone that has traditionally been responsible,
Marcus Daniels 33:56
you've had such a portfolio of successes and lessons learned over the last, you know, six plus years of MasterCard. But maybe you can walk us through a recent example of something that you're really proud of or really excited about, how it worked,
Maja Lapcevic 34:10
how it worked. I mean, the one that I just mentioned to you before, which is our net new it's called MasterCard move for commercial payments, which is all about, you know, moving money across border, but money essentially creating a network for large payments. So the billions and trillions of dollars that are moved between institutions and businesses as the world goes more real time, we know that those payments also need to move real time cross border, because they're going to have a massive impact on how small businesses can transact and get paid faster. It's also going to have massive impact in terms of, you know, the efficiencies in supply chains. And so, you know, for me, that was like a huge thing. It was a brand new network that has huge opportunity for the global economy.
Marcus Daniels 34:59
And. Many different groups of innovation groups with it across MasterCard was involved in that. Was it cross collaborative or?
Maja Lapcevic 35:09
Yes, it was three business units. So the business unit that I was part of, which is foundry, the innovation, and then our commercial and our transfer solutions teams, and then their tech teams, which was sit in programs within those business units?
Marcus Daniels 35:22
Yeah, I think that's the thing. I wanted to kind of pull out a bit, because we've seen a lot more of how you can galvanize different innovation groups to really have kind of a more substantial win and build more momentum and certainly share in the success. And, you know, the Ben's point early too, trying to unlock, you know, faster distribution throughout the overall network. Yes, absolutely.
Ben Yoskovitz 35:42
Is, is it? Is it challenging sometimes, to convince business units to do the sort of growth beyond the core type stuff while they're working, I assume, very hard on just keeping, not, not keeping the lights on, but keeping the business operating, you know, like, that's the that's the day job. So do you do? You are there ways that you've managed to get business units excited and on board with maybe what can feel like a little little bit more risk?
Maja Lapcevic 36:09
Sure. I mean, I think everyone knows that the at least in this use case that I, you know, shared with you, everyone knows that the total addressable problem in the kind of cross border, as well as in the B to B space is just massive. So didn't need to convince them from the opportunity. It was more about, how did we influence and demonstrate to them that we could create a concept to actually, you know, take a bite out of it, and that MasterCard, who's traditionally probably known more for consumer payments could be even in the consideration set. But luckily, the portfolio approach that we take is, you know, one of my responsibilities would be to work with the leaders of that unit to make sure that, you know, we're helping to influence strategy or share what the strategy that they are trying to develop. And sometimes that involves doing research to help kind of influence. Other times it's really building on their strategies, but together with them, so
Ben Yoskovitz 37:09
did you, in this particular case, on the cross border payments opportunity? Did the foundry and your team sort of go, everybody can see it, the problem space and the size of the prize did your team sort of go and say, let's go see if we can figure out that they're there, and then bring it back to the business units and say, Guys, I think we found something here. Now we need some resources and some capabilities and some prioritization from you to realize it is that how it played out?
Maja Lapcevic 37:36
So this one, I mean, no, actually, that one was very much done in collaboration with them. So they saw the opportunity, but it was like, how do we use foundry to help us validate there? There? Help us bring back the evidence. Help us bring back the evidence. So we did that in a number of ways, by collaborating with third parties, by customers, you know, prototyping, demonstrating the evidence that we could do it, and just taking that normal kind of product development
Ben Yoskovitz 38:02
approach, got it so it was more as if they saw they came to you and said, Can you help us do this focus on it with the speed and the skill set that your team has around rapid prototyping, experimentation and research? So they started, they brought it to you. You were able to do a bunch of that work and then collaborate back with them to work on the commercialization.
Maja Lapcevic 38:24
Yes, I mean, we don't do things separate from them. So when we our model of innovation is that those business units are involved with us. So we're creating the experiments together. We're building together the business cases. We're, you know, thinking through, like, how would we actually bring this to market? It's not like, give it to us, and we'll go off on the side, like everything that we do is very much embedded, and I think that's why the model succeeds. Because in the past, you know, in other organizations where I've worked, you had the kind of model where we go off on our own and then you get organ rejection, because it kind of wasn't thought of here. And so that's one of the ways that we kind of have been able to get success and launch things and commercialize things.
Marcus Daniels 39:06
Okay, what about is it co funded as well with the different
Maja Lapcevic 39:11
groups it is. So foundry exists to help MasterCard de risk new spaces, so we have our own resources. And therefore, you know, when people come to us with ideas, it's not just come out like come and do this for our behalf. We need to see that there is a material opportunity, and we will co invest in an opportunity, both funding and resources to explore it
Marcus Daniels 39:31
fantastic. What happens in the situation of having to kill a project, or some of the lessons learned when you're co funding a project? Is there ever a bit of a wrangle between maybe one group wants to own it going forward, or it's a collective decision to shut down a project? Well,
Maja Lapcevic 39:49
when it comes to kind of CO owning the project, we co own it in terms of seeing it through what we call market, de risking, and we never claim. That we will be the future P and L owner, and I think that also really helps the relationship upfront, because there's no competition. We're here to help our business units succeed and de risk opportunities, and that's why we're funded. And they come to us to work with us so that we don't have to disrupt their day to day operations. When we decide that market data has shown us that we don't need to move forward. It's okay, because that's exactly what our role is. Our role is to see if something is, you know, de risked or not.
Marcus Daniels 40:27
You're finding the truth, and you're providing that for everybody to see
Maja Lapcevic 40:31
exactly, without them having to risk their balance sheet or P L kind of for the of that year.
Ben Yoskovitz 40:35
How do you build up? And I know Foundry has been around for a while, but how do you build up trust with the business units? So I know it's an embedded model which I get, but they're still trusting another group, right? They're saying, Okay, we believe in your approach, we believe in this model, we believe in Maya, we believe in that team. How do you build up the trust with them that they feel like they can take this different approach to the work? Because, I say different, because I assume it's quite, you know, I know the foundry model, and I assume it's quite different from the day to day operations that those business units are executing again. So how do you build up that trust with them, so that they feel comfortable in this new way of working? I mean, I
Maja Lapcevic 41:17
think that, again, as you said, we our model has been around now for a while within MasterCard, I believe that the reason why it was successful from the beginning is that, you know, we are here to help them succeed, and ultimately to help MasterCard and our customers succeed. And that's the that's the approach we take. So we're not here to compete. We don't take credit. You know, like, even when something succeeds, I think
Ben Yoskovitz 41:41
even a little bit of credit, like, not even
Marcus Daniels 41:44
a smidge a
Maja Lapcevic 41:46
little bit, but, I mean, I would say that we are, as we often get paid in, like, accolade, internal accolades, to say, like, we did this because we worked with foundry, but I think, like, ultimately, it's success that drives greater success, Right? So, you know, as you know, with any partner, you look for quick wins. How can you help someone be successful quickly so you can build towards a bigger opportunity? And so when I start working with a new business unit, I'm always looking for, how can I quickly make somebody successful so that we can, you know, gain kind of the credibility to get more work, yeah,
Marcus Daniels 42:18
and I think it's such an important point of having that kind of integrated culture of innovation that's supportive and you understand the mission of how you're servicing these business units and sharing, you know, the accolades, maybe internally, but everybody's kind of united as winning, as winning as a team. Yeah,
Maja Lapcevic 42:34
absolutely. And I'm curious though, then, in the venture builder model, like, how do you do that with your customers, so that you're not competing, right, with those kind of internal innovation units?
Ben Yoskovitz 42:45
Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's not competing usually, because you're chasing very different things. So I think that's, that's, that's one part of it. You can still be collaborating with business units, but you are looking at, you know, h2 or h3 where they just have, they don't have the resources, for starters, the priorities are not on those things and the expertise or the capabilities to do it. So I think what we see in the sort of venture studio model is there is a bit of a separation, but it can't be so separated that, you know, to your point, it's like so siloed that it lives somewhere else and nobody knows what the heck's going on. Because eventually somebody says, What are they doing over there?
Maja Lapcevic 43:32
How do you like report back? Because for us, for example, I have business leaders. I have regular meetings with them and their strategy teams and quarterly reviews and things like that. So how do you in the venture model kind of tie back that reporting or sharing to the mothership?
Ben Yoskovitz 43:48
Yeah, there's, there's still, there's, there's always a governance model of sorts that exists. So sometimes it's in the form of, like a venture board. We would describe it as, so the person who runs the studio, let's say CEO, maybe there's a chief innovation officer, or even business unit folks are participating in that. So when you're bringing things back and you're saying, here's the progress we made on this opportunity or this problem or this space, they're seeing that and connected to it and also learning about well, how are you working differently? So we can maybe take some of those learnings and leverage them even inside of our h1 innovation. So there's, there's a governance structure that exists a venture board. Often we will sit on it. So often a venture board has an external party as well, who brings sort of that. Hey, I don't have a dog in the political fight that may exist here. I just want to see these ventures win. But you also often see things that a studio builds get integrated back into the core so they sort of separate it out so that it can move faster. It can do things that maybe the core just isn't set up to do. But then you say, Oh, that's not really a business. This by itself. It's actually a capability that could help scale something in the so you do need a path to sort of scale things independently, but also a path to bring things back in, because it's better suited scaling on the inside. Yeah,
Marcus Daniels 45:13
and some of the cases we've seen, it's there's sometimes healthy competition, but ultimately it's about cooperation and really driving things. The on ramps has been described like building businesses that will help support and amplify things into the core, or looking at things that aren't a great fit, that help drive, you know, external growth innovation. The other piece I would add is goes back to the CO funding, and so the more you have dollars that are shared, or that level of alignment, then you start driving towards being part of the same team, opposed to trying to really compete. And so there's real skin in the game. And we've seen sometimes challenges with some studios that are really funded purely on the outside, have their own mandate, and then they become really competitive to kind of core innovation groups. And the other hack that we've also seen is, how do you also get people from the inside to be seconded on the outside and building back to Ben's comment earlier about having trust, right? That takes time, and I think it takes shared wins, but also shared lessons learned from things that didn't win. So all that kind of knowledge, and I think the construct of the of the governance model is probably the most important unlock to have that kind of balance in the Force.
Maja Lapcevic 46:25
That's probably one of the biggest learnings we had those governance models like, I think, in our early days, we didn't necessarily have those right structures. And while ideas might have been great, you know, not having that alignment is so key. What was a massive learning for us, for other portfolio initiatives. And do people usually come to you with the idea, or do you kind of collaborate on the on the idea or the opportunity?
Ben Yoskovitz 46:49
It's both, but often they're coming to us with an area that they're interested in exploring. So not a hey, I think the the idea is x, let's go build that thing, because usually at that point they're too committed to it, and we're like, what if that's wrong? So usually it's a customer segment or a mega trend that's it that's happening that they're like, I think we have to explore that and try to understand it. So it starts at a pretty high, vague ish level, quite often, and then part of our job in a studio model, again, is to say, how quickly can we get to ideas demonstrate an ability to experiment and execute things? Because I think Maya you said quick wins earlier, which I 100% agree with. If you're off and you spend three years building the operating model and futzing around, nobody's gonna care anymore. So it's often in that vague we should go explore this thing, but we can't have our existing business units do it because they're too focused on executing the one year roadmap. So we do want to create a little bit of separation, and that's where that venture studio, venture building model becomes an interesting way of doing it.
Marcus Daniels 47:57
That's great. Well, I think a lot of people sometimes go and say, a lot of corporate innovation is innovation theater. And I think what we've seen over the years is a lot of great core innovation gets executed, and a lot of as you describe, you get the internal credit of things, but don't get the external validation sometimes. And I don't think there's a there's a lack of, maybe attribution to how much some of these innovation growth, innovation firms, I mean, units are actually should get that they don't get.
Maja Lapcevic 48:26
Yeah, I definitely would agree with that. I mean, I think the I believe, you know, there's a lot of people that are doing core innovation, or just innovation, I don't know if this is where people would agree. Like, in some ways, I do agree with that there's a lot of innovation theater still, and what I don't agree with is the fact that I think a lot of people's systems have matured so that they're not just looking at those early kind of theater like, Let's do innovation for the sake of innovation or challenges, but they've also tackled like capabilities on the back end so that they actually start Showing meaningful results. I've seen that. I've seen the whole industry kind of mature more,
Ben Yoskovitz 49:05
right? Which is, which is a positive, right? So you're, we're putting, we're putting a positive spin on innovation. No, that's good. Why not end on a positive spin? So Maya, thank you for joining us. We really appreciate the time. Great conversation.
Maja Lapcevic 49:18
Thank you so much. It was really great, and I hope to see you soon.
We always enjoy conversations about innovation and startup building so please get in touch.
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