Associate Consultant, 2026 Launch Graduate Program - Melbourne, Australia

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

Associate Consultant, 2026 Launch Graduate Program - Melbourne, Australia

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. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses realize their greatest potential. 
Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all. 

The Mastercard Launch program is aimed at early career talent, to help you develop skills and gain cross-functional work experience. Over a period of 18 months, Launch participants will be assigned to a business unit, learn and develop skills, and gain valuable on the job experience. 

Overview 
The Data & Services team is a key differentiator for Mastercard, providing cutting-edge advisory services that help our customers grow. Focused on thinking big and scaling fast around the globe, this agile team is responsible for end-to-end solutions for a diverse global customer base. We combine traditional management consulting with our rich data assets and in-house technology to provide our clients with powerful strategic insights and recommendations.

Make an Impact as an Associate Consultant
As an Associate Consultant, you will collaborate with exceptional colleagues to help some of the world's biggest brands answer their most challenging strategic questions. Working with technology and data, you will gain broad exposure to a range of industries, including financial services, retail, restaurants, hospitality and more.

As an Associate Consultant, you will:
• Work on small teams to solve our clients' most challenging strategic problems
• Build strong relationships with clients to understand their business needs, find strategic solutions and guide impactful decisions
• Grow your career by receiving hands-on mentorship from an experienced management team
• Have an immediate opportunity for meaningful contributions, increased responsibility, leadership roles, and professional advancement
• Collaborate with colleagues across different areas of the organization and quickly gain exposure to business development, account management, and product management
• Receive extensive training focusing on helping you build your core consulting skill set

We are looking for passionate and talented professionals, who share our vision for helping our customers with their most urgent business needs, and we are recruiting for 3 career tracks that make up our team:

1) Business Experimentation
Advise executives on business decisions by leveraging data and applying science to the way they run their business. Using Mastercard’s industry-leading Predictive Analytics SaaS platform, Test & Learn®, you will work with customers to identify their key priorities and then design and run business experiments to establish which ideas work, where, when and how to deploy them, and what not to do. In working with customers this way, you get to understand the full range of their business, from new product launches, marketing, loyalty, and pricing, to operations and strategy.

Sampling of questions we help our customers answer:
• Where should a retailer open new stores to maximize profitability and minimize the cannibalization of nearby omnichannel sales?
• What bonus should be provided to someone opening a credit card account to entice them to use the card regularly?

2) Marketing
Marketing consultants lead the strategy development and implementation of campaigns and engagements for clients. They use customer data to provide deep direct marketing expertise across channels, evaluating campaign results and adapting the approach to optimize marketing performance.

Marketing consultants answer questions like:
• How does a financial institution optimize new customer acquisition and existing customer’s life cycle value through targeted email campaigns?
• What is the right channel mix to engage potential customers when launching a new item at a quick service restaurant?
• What marketing collateral can a retailer use to drive online traffic, and increase spend per customer?

3) Performance Analytics
Translate data into insights leveraging Mastercard and customer data. Get hands-on to design, implement & scale analytical solutions for customers across industries. Apply qualitative and quantitative analytical techniques using our enterprise applications (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, NiFi, Python, Impala, and more) to synthesize analyses into clear recommendations and impactful narratives.

Sampling of questions we help our customers answer:
• How does a financial institution's fraud/authorization metrics fare against competitors, and what are strategies that can help it be best-in-class?
• How is a technology customer’s market share changing over time, and are there any segments where the client is relatively under penetrated?

4) Strategy & Transformation
Lead customers through sound decision making as they tackle strategic, tactical, operational, and transformational challenges, spanning across diverse topics including product, marketing, loyalty, innovation, and more. Apply a broad set of problem-solving techniques to improve overall performance and operations.

Sampling of questions we help our customers answer:
• How can a global financial services institution be successful at entering a hyper competitive new market?
• How can a customer improve its operating model to better achieve operational, financial and strategic goals?

Bring your Passion and Expertise

We recruit for and value the following core competencies:
• Passion: Actively seeks responsibility and takes pride in delivering the highest quality results and recommendations to our clients.
• Analytic Excellence: Demonstrates a strong aptitude for structured problem solving and quantitative skills.
• Business Interest: Clear interest in the world of business, and intuition for the way that companies make decisions.
• Rapid Growth: Eagerness to learn quickly, both through Mastercard's structured training curriculum and organic development opportunities.
• Teamwork: Willingness to work within small teams to produce outstanding deliverables, with a will to win attitude.
• Integrity: Commitment to Mastercard's values of honesty and integrity with a willingness to embrace and learn from our mistakes.
• Diverse Perspective: Brings a unique skillset or approach to the table in every client engagement or internal activity.
• Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with demonstrated leadership abilities.

Qualifications:
• Undergraduate or master’s students graduating between July 2025 - Feb 2026
• Able to start work on 2 Feb 2026 (start dates are fixed)
• Outstanding record of academic achievement
• Proven record of leadership in a work setting and/or through extracurricular activities
• Exceptional analytical and quantitative problem-solving skills
• Experience using data analysis or querying tools (e.g., SQL, SAS, Excel or Tableau) is an asset (particularly for Performance Analytics or Business Experimentation tracks).
• Ability to communicate complex ideas effectively – both verbally and in writing – in English and the local office language(s)
• You would need to possess right to work in Australia, without work visa sponsorship.

Visa Sponsorship: Mastercard Australia cannot sponsor intern and full-time employment visas, and only candidates who possess full legal working rights in Australia will be considered (PRs & Citizens of AUS/NZ only).

In your cover letter, please indicate your first and second track preference. This information will be leveraged to best match applicants with their desired tracks.

Track placement will indicate the types of projects where you will spend the majority of your time, however, we encourage and enable working across tracks to allow team members to acquire a diverse set of skills and experiences.

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.