Despite all the talk about fintech disruption - banking, finance, and payments remain highly regulated industries with well-established competitors who are not standing still - even in this moment of rapid change and digital reinvention. Mastercard is one such company. They created Mastercard Labs as a way of co-creating and innovating with their customers. The idea was to turn external signals into opportunities, and in' doing so, de-risk' them for their clients and for the rest of the organization. So, for example, they are working on quantum computing with IBM. They have established their own proprietary blockchain and several AI projects and were behind the Apple Card's tokenization, which allowed it to work without the standard 16 digits.

To learn more about how Mastercard manages their innovation portfolio, I spoke with Ken Moore, who is the Chief Innovation Officer at Mastercard and also Head of Mastercard Labs. Ken is responsible for the company's R&D initiatives globally. Prior to joining Mastercard, he was a Director at Citibank, where he established Citi's first Innovation Lab and subsequently expanded it globally to create a network of collaborative innovation centers across the company.

In this episode, you will learn:

0:00 How the pandemic has changed consumer behavior

3:00 Why Mastercard needed an innovation lab

10:16 The importance of de-risking innovation

13:51 How to use innovation portfolios

21:14 The future customer journey

26:49 Engaging the startup community

29:38 Learning from the Chinese payments ecosystem

33:07 Mastercard’s 7 innovation portfolios