Legal Counsel

Our Purpose

Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we’re helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.

Title and Summary

Who is Mastercard?

Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible.

We help our clients leverage rich messaging functionality and applications to capture business and consumer payment flows both domestically and cross-border; offer solutions to connect, enable, and safeguard the Open Finance ecosystem, and protect banks and their customers from financial crime. All this is supported by account-based data insights and consulting to help our clients optimise their payment strategies across the world. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.

We cultivate a culture of inclusion for all employees that respects their individual strengths, views, and experiences. We believe that our differences enable us to be a better team - one that makes better decisions, drives innovation and delivers better results.

Position

Counsel, Product & Services legal

Location

London, UK / Copenhagen, Denmark.

As our team supports the business globally, the role will require some travel and ability to support other time zones.

Overview

We are looking for an experienced lawyer to join our legal team, providing support and advice to the Mastercard Global Open Banking and Developer Experience team, with a particular focus on European and international development of the next generation of open banking products and solutions.

This role reports into a Director, Legal Services.

If you are highly motivated, intellectually curious and analytical and love tackling legal challenges, this is the perfect opportunity for you.

Role

This role handles product development, commercial contracting with customers, suppliers and partners and general legal support matters for the business on a day-to-day basis, identifying and analysing relevant issues and helping the business effectively navigate legal and regulatory risks and implement appropriate controls, policies and processes. Your key responsibilities will include:

• Product Support: Provide comprehensive legal support throughout the product lifecycle, from development to launch and beyond. Identify and help ensure our products comply with Mastercard policies, relevant laws, regulations and industry standards
• Commercial Contracts: Draft, review, negotiate, and manage a variety of commercial agreements with our customers, suppliers and other partners.
• Dispute Resolution: Handle and advise on disputes with third-party suppliers and clients.
• Stakeholder Management and Collaboration: Build and maintain strong relationships with internal stakeholders, working in collaboration with specialists (including Franchise, regulatory, data privacy and intellectual property counsel and compliance teams) providing strategic legal advice and support.
• External Counsel Coordination: Instruct and manage external legal advisors within agreed policy and budget

The role will support both Product Legal and Corporate Governance activities. At a high level, this includes legal support for our products and services and related contracting activities, alongside support for corporate governance matters, including board and management reporting and committee support.

Please note that the above is a guideline only. Roles within Mastercard evolve with the needs of the business and department.

All About You

• Qualified Lawyer with a strong academic background.
• Ability to identify core legal issues, put these into a context of the business you support and articulate them clearly.
• Prior experience with commercial contracting, technology and/or financial regulation.
• Prior experience in supporting new product development, even if in a different industry, is considered a strong asset.
• Ability to identify regulatory, data privacy and intellectual property issues.
• Strong drafting, writing, oral communication, and negotiating skills,
• Customer-focused with a willingness to learn and build strong working relationships with internal clients and stakeholders.
• Can-do attitude, self-motivated and able to drive delivery against objectives.
• Excellent organisational skills and attention to detail.
• Interested in financial services and payment technologies (prior experience? Even better).

Don’t meet every single requirement? Every person is unique. If you’re a qualified lawyer, excited about this role, looking to make an impact in a dynamic environment and you believe you can bring something special to our team, we’d love to hear from you!

Corporate Security Responsibility

All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and, therefore, it is expected that every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must:

• Abide by Mastercard’s security policies and practices;

• Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed;

• Report any suspected information security violation or breach, and

• Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard’s guidelines.