Manager, Business Development, MCDS

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 powers economies and empowers people in more than 210 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 payment choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart, and accessible. Our technology, innovation, partnerships, and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses, and governments realize their greatest potential.

The Mastercard Direct Services (MCDS) team in EEMEA develops and manages Financial Institutions, Neo Banks, Digital Payment Providers in emerging and high growth markets. The team drives business growth by supporting those that enable making and accepting payments to scale exponentially and drive a differentiated product suite. Additionally, the team supports partners with insights, operational guidance, and Mastercard product adoption to accelerate market development.

Role specification

The person will be responsible for driving partnerships and commercialization for our MCDS segment in our Africa Division. As an Business Development Manager within Mastercard’s MCDS team, you will be responsible for managing, developing, and growing relationships with key customers. You will play a central role in driving the performance of Mastercard’s payment ecosystem by supporting partners’ business objectives, optimizing acceptance, and ensuring the delivery of Mastercard’s products, solutions, and value-added services.

This role requires a blend of relationship management, commercial acumen, payments expertise, and the ability to collaborate cross-functionally to provide high-impact results for partners and Mastercard.

Major Accountabilities:

• Enter and grow new strategic markets with an emerging customer base.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for assigned partners and further build partner pipeline.
• Build deep, trusted relationships with stakeholders across commercial, product, operations teams.
• Develop and execute account plans aligned with partner business priorities and Mastercard’s strategic goals.
• Identify and drive opportunities to grow Mastercard’s acceptance, transaction volume, and revenue across partners.
• Monitor performance metrics and KPIs; proactively address gaps and recommend improvements.
• Advocate Mastercard’s products, value-added services, and innovation initiatives to partners, ensuring successful deployment and adoption.
• Support technical and operational enablement in collaboration with internal functional teams.

About you

Knowledge / Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in business or equivalent work experience
• 7+ years related work experience, preferably in financial services
• Experience in specialist sales, product management, product development, and project management desirable

Skills/ Abilities:

• Must be considered an expert and have a detailed experience in Financial Institutions and payments
• Must have detailed knowledge of products and services specific to the industry
• In-depth experience executing and managing business development strategies for emerging and complex countries/regions/industry verticals
• Track record in achieving business development targets and building customer relationships through customer sales
• Demonstrated success introducing existing and new/emerging solutions into various countries/regions/industry verticals
• Led cross-functional projects within own country/region
• Excellent verbal communication, comfortable presenting, influencing and negotiating at senior management level, able to shift gears for audiences from different business disciplines of varying technical ability
• Self-starter with a strong work ethic and highly organized, holding self and others to high standards, able to work autonomously and as part of a team, fostering a positive team culture

• Open and creative; comfortable with uncertainty in a changing/fast paced environment and comfortable driving change

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.