Mastercard
Toronto, Canada
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.
Director, Business Expansion & Transformation
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.
Business & Market Insights (B&MI) is one of the fastest-growing divisions within Mastercard’s Services organization, bringing together data, analytics, consulting, and insight capabilities that extend well beyond core payments. Business Expansion & Transformation (BET) is a new-to-Mastercard team within B&MI, charged with bridging B&MI’s current growth momentum with its 2030 ambition. BET does this by defining the strategic aperture for where the enterprise should source and originate new growth opportunities, identifying and interpreting internal and external signals, and translating those signals into tangible, investable opportunities. BET owns the front end of the growth lifecycle—from opportunity sourcing and origination through evaluation, portfolio construction, and graduation into development. This work includes standing up new business verticals – products outside existing portfolios with use cases spanning multiple portfolios – as well as foundational capabilities that strengthen the current portfolio and create pathways to businesses the company could not otherwise build. BET acts as the accountable end-to-end steward, first building and owning the opportunity pipeline, then coordinating product, technology, and go-to-market partners to advance initiatives from early concept to scale.
Overview
Reporting to the VP, Sourcing & Portfolio Strategy and working with a team of senior analysts, the Director sits across two adjacent but distinct strategy disciplines. The first is corporate and portfolio strategy: owning the health of BET’s Investment Theses across the long-horizon spaces BET is committed to, within which many individual investments are made that reinforce one another over time. The second, and the larger share of the day-to-day role, is directing rapid due diligence on specific opportunities for discrete capability or program prospects, bringing a venture and private-equity diligence skillset to bear in compressed, 2–4 week “pre-Frame” sprints. This is not a traditional corporate strategy role; it is closer to a Venture Partner or Corporate Venture Director, and it requires genuine fluency in both disciplines rather than depth in only one.
Sitting at the intersection of strategy and a broad internal ecosystem, the Director works closely with the VP, Sourcing & Portfolio Strategy as opportunities are originated, directs the pre-Frame diligence sprint that builds conviction on a given opportunity, then takes ownership as opportunities move out of Sourcing – partnering with BET’s Director of Product Management, Foundry, M&A and other execution leaders while ensuring the original opportunity thesis and investment rationale survive the journey from origination through build, launch, and eventual scale.
Role
•Partner with the VP, Sourcing & Portfolio Strategy to define and continuously evolve BET's portfolio of strategic growth opportunities where Mastercard has a meaningful right to win, market attractiveness is compelling, and investments reinforce one another to create long-term strategic advantage. Lead the ongoing process to assess and refresh these opportunity areas, ensuring clear investment rationale, priorities, and capability plans are developed to support execution.
•Lead rapid, 2–4 week pre-Frame diligence efforts on new opportunities, including commercial, strategic, market, customer, and competitive assessment. Build the conviction needed to determine whether opportunities should be built, partnered, invested in, acquired, or deprioritized, leveraging a venture capital and private equity-style diligence approach that represents a significant portion of the role.
•Own the transition of opportunities from sourcing and validation into execution pathways, including Product Development, Partnerships, and M&A. Ensure research approaches, recommendations, and outputs align with the original opportunity vision and establish clear plans with execution partners while remaining focused on strategic sponsorship rather than day-to-day delivery.
•Act as a strategic sponsor for a portfolio of opportunity areas, defining investment rationale, success metrics, strategic objectives, and executive recommendations. Provide ongoing sponsorship as opportunities progress through validation, incubation, market testing, and scale, partnering closely with Product, Technology, Foundry, and other stakeholders who lead execution.
•Lead and develop a small team of senior analysts, establishing scalable tools, processes, and operating standards that strengthen BET's sourcing and portfolio capabilities. Leverage automation, artificial intelligence, and intelligent agents to expand opportunity coverage, improve signal detection, and accelerate synthesis and prioritization without proportional headcount growth.
All about you:
Seasoned professional across strategy consulting, corporate strategy, portfolio strategy, growth strategy, corporate development, M&A strategy, venture capital, private equity, or relevant builder/operator roles.
Fluency in two adjacent but distinct toolkits – corporate strategy and rapid venture-style due diligence.
Experience building and directing small, high-caliber teams of analysts.
Credibility with enterprise leadership, strong commercial and analytical judgment, and the ability to operate in complex, matrixed environments, with a willingness to engage directly in diligence, modeling, and validation alongside the team.
Exceptional communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to develop investment recommendations that influence senior leadership and deep curiosity about emerging technologies and new business models.
Diligence experience across domains such as emerging technology, fintech, consumer insights, analytics, data platforms, or payments is a strong plus.
Fluency in consumer insights and research design – the ability to evaluate research design and interpret findings for foundational conviction-building work; this is not a consumer insights leadership or execution role, and the requirement is fluency, not ownership.
Mastercard is a merit-based, inclusive, equal opportunity employer that considers applicants without regard to gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We hire the most qualified candidate for the role. In the US or Canada, if you require accommodations or assistance to complete the online application process or during the recruitment process, please contact reasonable_accommodation@mastercard.com and identify the type of accommodation or assistance you are requesting. Do not include any medical or health information in this email. The Reasonable Accommodations team will respond to your email promptly.
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:
In line with Mastercard’s total compensation philosophy and assuming that the job will be performed in Canada, the successful candidate will be offered a competitive pay based on location, experience and other qualifications for the role and may be eligible to participate in a discretionary annual incentive program. This posting reflects one or more current openings on our team.
Toronto, Canada: $150,000 - $234,000 CAD