Associate Consultant Intern, 2025 - South Africa

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 Intern, 2025 - South Africa

Internship Program

The Mastercard Internship Program offers penultimate year students an immersive experience to challenge the status quo, gain real work-life skills in a global company, drive decency and belonging, and grow their personal and professional development. We invite you to bring your passion, share your talent, and make the most of this truly priceless experience.

Services within Mastercard is responsible for acquiring, engaging, and retaining customers by managing fraud and risk, enhancing cybersecurity, and improving the digital payments experience. We provide value-added services and leverage expertise, data-driven insights, and execution.

Make an Impact as an Associate Consultant Intern

As an Associate Consultant Intern, you will collaborate within small teams to help some of the world's biggest brands answer and often implement solutions for their most challenging strategic questions. You will immediately create meaningful contributions through taking ownership of deliverables and building external relationships with clients. Focusing on 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 Intern, you will:

1. Participate in volunteer and team building experiences
2. Gain exposure to our leadership team through networking sessions and speaker series
3. Begin to build relationships with clients to understand their business needs, seek strategic solutions and guide impactful decisions
4. Grow by receiving hands-on mentorship from an experienced management team
5. Have an opportunity for meaningful contributions
6. Collaborate with colleagues across different areas of the organization and gain exposure to business development, account management, and product management

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

Strategy & Transformation

Guide clients through strategic, tactical, operational, and transformational challenges to enhance performance and operations. Our engagements cover diverse areas, including product development, marketing, customer loyalty, and innovation. Working with clients from various industries, many S&T engagements directly interface with numerous Fortune 500 companies.

Performance Analytics

Use quantitative and qualitative skills and enterprise applications (e.g., Business Intelligence Platforms, SQL, Python, and more) to drive data-led consulting solutions for customers. Engage with client stakeholders through virtual and in-person meetings, leveraging insights to inform strategic recommendations.

Marketing

Develop strategies and lead implementation of marketing campaigns and engagements; evaluate results to drive performance on behalf of Mastercard’s clients. Provide deep direct marketing expertise across channels, leveraging customer, behavioral, and transactional data.

Bring your Passion and Expertise

We recruit for and value the following core competencies:

1. Passion: Actively seeks responsibility and takes pride in delivering the highest quality results and recommendations to our clients.
2. Analytic Excellence: Demonstrates a strong aptitude for structured problem solving, analytical and quantitative skills.
3. Business Interest: Clear interest in the world of business, and intuition for the way that companies make decisions.
4. Rapid Growth: Eagerness to learn quickly.
5. Teamwork: Willingness to work within small teams to produce outstanding deliverables.
6. Integrity: Outstanding record of academic achievement.
7. Diverse Perspective: Brings a unique skillset or approach to the table in every client engagement or internal activity.
8. Communication: Ability to communicate complex ideas effectively.

Qualifications:

1. To be available to work Full-time between approximately Mid June'25 to July'25.
2. To be a Penultimate Masters/Undergraduate Student, due to graduate no earlier than October 2025 Or Final year student as appropriate.
3. Innovative thinking and thoughtful risk-taking.
4. Ability to partner across the organization.
5. Sound communication skills.
6. Citizenship Requirement: Applicants for this position must be a citizen of South Africa in order to be considered for this role.
7. Expert PC skills including proficiency in Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Access.

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

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