Five Questions with Jack Tominey, Director, Global Partnerships Mastercard

We caught up with Jack Tominey, Director, Global Partnerships to hear about how Mastercard is helping to drive global expansion and realize local impact with global financial institutions.

Tell us about your role at Mastercard

I'm based in London and work in the Global Financial Institutions team as an Account Director for one of our key strategic accounts, Revolut. Our work in 2024 has focused on central strategic workstreams including supporting global expansion, driving customer growth and optimizing card relevance and use. It's a wide breadth of activity and it takes a lot of people and energy to achieve great results. We've collaborated on global engagement strategies to ensure that stakeholders at Mastercard and Revolut build impactful relationships that help us to understand each other's business, and identify the right solutions to add value for Revolut’s customers.

I spend a lot of my time meeting new people and developing relationships with my contacts which blends perfectly with my personality - I enjoy delivering for my clients and putting smiles on their faces. I'm lucky to work with countless talented people at Mastercard and Revolut and I don't take that for granted.

Can you share an example of how you work with global financial partners?

A great example from this year is the dynamic relationship we've built between Mastercard and Revolut's global marketing teams. We've partnered on campaigns across Europe to power customer acquisition across consumer and commercial portfolios. We've also gone live in Australia with a great commercial acquisition campaign and we're excited about launching in many more markets in 2025 and beyond. We're proud of the campaigns that have gone live and the benefits they are bringing to consumers, but also delighted at how the teams at Mastercard and Revolut have gelled together.

We've recently launched a podcast with Breaking Banks that talks about Revolut's growth story and the role played by Mastercard's Marketing Services team in 2024. It's worth a listen to understand how our two businesses have come together to drive specific objectives through Mastercard's services capabilities. We've also joined Revolut in celebrating their landmark 50 million global customer event by introducing a Mastercard ambassador to participate on the day.?

As I mentioned previously, the key to success has been building great relationships internally at Mastercard and with the Marketing team at Revolut. When you work with global financial partners, you produce proposals with the philosophy that it's an art not a science. We put our best foot forward but you must listen to your partners, adjust your approach and then work relentlessly to deliver the right outcomes.

How do you help your partners to drive global expansion and local relevance?

You need to adopt an open mind to operate at a high level strategically but also get into the detail of local cultures and specific payments dynamics. On the strategic front, we implement practical solutions to help identify which new markets are best for launch and where to activate campaigns that'll attract new customers at scale. However, you have to learn from local experts in our markets across the world. Don't tell my colleagues but we don't always know best sat in a central office - we need to build relationships at a local level and introduce our colleagues to our clients to share valuable insights.

One of our customer contacts is responsible for identifying the next best markets for launch. You need to gather wide ranging data sources to do this effectively but our contact recently told us that they learnt more from a 30 minute discussion with our local expert than they did from weeks of desk research. It's crucial that these connections are made to refine propositions at a local level, there's only so much you can learn without them.

Any common themes or challenges that stand out across your industry interactions?

Three key themes consistently stand out when I speak to industry contacts:

●??????? Customer primacy:?whilst customer acquisition is always a key focus, the ultimate goal is to achieve primacy behavior where customer salaries land in products and people trust them for their financial behaviors and habits.?

●??????? Trust, safety and security:?Continuing the trust theme, this area is absolutely essential in maintaining long term relationships with consumers. I've worked in marketing roles for much of my career and I love to launch campaigns...but without trust you can't win people over.

●??????? Laser focus on KPIs, data and objectives:?everything we do with clients is laser focused on data, ranging from business case forecasts to post-project analytics. Mastercard's Services Division plays an integral role in what we do in this space through the power of their data and services capabilities.?

What excites you the most as we approach a new year / what can we expect in 2025?

Firstly, it's important to reflect on what we've achieved this year over a mince pie and an oat flat white. You have to celebrate the achievements and reflect on what can be done better in the future. We've already been doing the latter to challenge ourselves to be more efficient and impactful in 2025.

What I'm looking forward to most is a series of workshops setup for January to hit the ground running for our plans in 2025. This will give us fresh energy to deliver more projects and campaigns in more countries throughout the year and further into the future.?

I'm also hoping Arsenal's injury crisis comes to an end so we can finally win the league - but that might be one for 2026.?

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Check out the recent Breaking Banks podcast featuring Mastercard and Revolut here: Fintech Visionaries and Revolutionaries & What's Up With Bitcoin? - Provoke.fm Media