May 7, 2025
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.
We always enjoy conversations about innovation and startup building so please get in touch.
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