Scaling products the Mastercard Way!
Here's a quick read from Mastercard's Digital Future team's Kiki Del Valle on how they innovate and grow.
Corporations are looking at in-house acceleration programs as a credible strategy to bring in a fresh lease of life into their businesses. Most large corporations realize the skewed impact a start-up can have on their business and are now more than ever inclined to partner and support their growth in exchange for value.
In a recent event organized by CB Insights, Mastercard shared their ‘digital accelerator strategy’. Here’s a quick overview of the key ideas shared by ‘Kiki Del Valle’, Mastercard's SVP of Digital Future.
Key Takeaways
Standardize and streamline the on-boarding process for startups.
An unresolved business problem should start the discussion on which tech to prioritize. Innovation with tech for the sake of it almost always backfires.
Allow problem-solving by customizing existing products before developing new ones.
Mastercard is at the forefront of digital payment technologies. It intends to maintain its position by using innovation as its growth strategy. In this agile world, scaling products quickly is a challenge for most organizations, but Mastercard seems to be acing it in many ways.
The Art of Scale at Mastercard
At Mastercard, no solution is good unless it can achieve scale. Quoting Kiki, “At scale basically means trying to find marketable solutions that can actually work for a large number of customers that we (Mastercard) manage”. Mastercard has developed a ‘StartPath Program’ wherein they pair up with startups to build products and live commercial pilots. This partnership helps solve pain points for Mastercard’s clients and supports startups with access to their customers.
Insight
Forming partnerships with other organizations can help accelerate your product growth as you can achieve scale and implement innovation faster.
Mastercard’s framework for start-up partnerships
Standardize and streamline the on-boarding of startups to fast-forward innovation.
Treat digital partners as customers to incorporate a diverse internal ecosystem.
Build technology to help scale partnerships and reach Minimal Functional Products (MFP).
Focus on building MFPs which can be commercialized further down the line.
Create a collaborative environment that fosters trust and innovation.
She further says, “We (Mastercard) envision a world where every device is a commerce device. A world where consumers are not bound to having to use their physical plastic cards but one where they can use whatever device is convenient for them.” An example of this is the ‘FitPay Partnership’ through which the combined forces developed contactless payments for Garmin devices (watches). Mastercard’s approach helped this project reach scale 2x faster than ApplePay.
Insight
Move over MVP and focus on MFP. What’s the difference? MFP builds the commercialization strategy early into the process of testing the minimum viable product. FitPay is a great example of this strategy.
Samsung fridge failure: Swallowing the bitter pill
Mastercard also paired up with Samsung to develop ‘Samsung Fridge’ which could order groceries through the refrigerator. It was a big failure for Samsung and Mastercard. According to Kiki, the product went over cost, and Mastercard had to let it go. Samsung failed to fill the order gap leaving Mastercard with no path to scale.
Insight
Leading innovation with technology as opposed to solving business needs through technology innovation is an approach that is bound to fail. Instead, a business should always start with a ‘why’ and progress with a ‘how’ to solve its problems.
A business does not always require a new product to solve its problems. Allowing customization and flexibility in an existing product is a faster approach to follow.
Conclusion
Mastercard’s approach to innovation begins with a business case and involves a strategy predicated on partnering with start-ups. It’s a great case-study for a corporate VC, strategist or CEO looking to figure out a way to funnel innovation into their organization’s blood streams.