xHow Mastercard
rapidly adapts tochange with anagile workforce OSwith Gloat’s Talent Marketplace

Customersuccess story: Mastercard
Customer success story: Mastercard

Summary
31,740 work days saved in one year**

57% of Mastercard’s projects are related todeveloping new products and services

500,000+ unlocked hours$55,000,000 in unlocked productivity

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mastercard launched
Project Possible, an internal employee matching initiative. Inspiredby the program’s early success, leaders sought to scale it soemployees could hone new skills and help the business meet everevolving demands. By rolling out its agile workforce OS, Unlocked,
Mastercard empowers its entire workforce to expand their horizons
and maximize the value they deliver for the business.
** Work days saved is calculated by multiplying the 3,181 projects assigned on Unlocked
multiplied by 34 days saved

Customer success story: Mastercard2

Overview
Headquarters:
Purchase, NY

Brands & products:
Global payments technology

Company size:
35,000Founding year:
1966

Industry type:
Financial services

Website:https://www.mastercard.us/enus.html

Mastercard is a global technology company that aims to connect and power an
inclusive digital economy that benefits everyone by making their transactions safe,smart, and accessible. Their innovations use secure data and networks to help
individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses achieve their greatest
potential. With connections across more than 80 countries, Mastercard aims to build
a sustainable world that unlocks priceless opportunities for all.

Customer success story: Mastercard3

The Background
Mastercard’s transformation began with a once-in-a-lifetime callto action. The company’s then-CEO asked employees one crucial
question: “How can we step up to help our customers?”. Amidst
pandemic-induced uncertainty, Mastercard’s customers were looking
for guidance to determine how to move forward.
The influx of employees who raised their hands to participate planted
the seeds for Project Possible, an initiative to empower people to pitch
in on projects across priority areas of the business. The program’s
early success shed light on a much larger opportunity to build on
the strength of Mastercard’s culture. After two waves of manuallymatching people to opportunities, leaders decided to scale up theirinitiative so that everyone could take part in it—and start honing theskills Mastercard would need to remain at the forefront of innovation.
As Lucrecia Borgonovo, Mastercard’s Chief Talent and Organizational
Effectiveness Officer notes, “Based on the success we got from ProjectPossible, we realized that if we wanted to do this at scale and embed
it in our organization’s DNA, we needed to do something moresophisticated. So we started looking for solutions.”

Customer success story: Mastercard

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The Goals
Mastercard developed a handful of goals to guide its transformation.
These objectives included:

Increase skills visibility to drive
strategic decision-making

Improve time to value by increasing
cross-functional collaboration

Create meaningful career growth
opportunities to promote engagement
and retention

Customer success story: Mastercard

5Increase skills visibility to drive strategic
decision-making
Disruption isn’t limited to COVID-19; instead, volatility continues
to hallmark our working world. Recognizing this, Mastercard
sought to encourage employees to dynamically develop skills whileproviding leaders with in-depth insights into these capabilities andforeshadowing any emerging knowledge gaps.
“Now that disruption is the new norm, we really need employees tobe on top of their game. They need to stay current, stay relevant, learn
new skills, and become agile,” explains Borgonovo. As Mastercard
created development pathways, leaders would also need visibility
into where these capabilities lie—which is where the skills intelligence
tools within an agile workforce OS come into play.
Systems like Gloat’s Skills Foundation would equip leaders with theinsights needed to make strategic decisions about how to reallocate talenteffectively as well as determining future hiring and skill-building needs.

Improve time to value by increasing crossfunctional collaboration and project
participation“People often get siloed, no matter what. People just get locked into
what they’re doing and then getting them involved in other types ofprojects isn’t easy,” notes Rohit Chauhan, Executive Vice Presidentof AI. Instead of limiting employees’ scope to their roles and teams,

Customer success story: Mastercard

6Mastercard sought to empower people to pitch in on projects acrosstheir organization.
Launching a talent marketplace would provide employees withgreater insight into the breadth of opportunities available and enable
managers to diversify their talent pools. “This actually provides
internal consulting,” notes Fraccaro, describing the platform. “It gives
people opportunities when normally the structures and the silos thatwe’ve got would prevent this movement of talent.”
In addition to helping them develop new skills, participating incross-functional projects would broaden the impact employees
make across Mastercard. Rather than relying on freelancers
or contractors, managers could tap into internal talent that’s
already up to speed on Mastercard’s ways of working, in turnenabling the enterprise to rapidly respond to emerging priorities.

Create meaningful career growth
opportunities to promote engagement
and retention
As Chief People Officer Michael Fraccaro explains, “Our employees told
us they want more opportunities to grow and develop themselves.
We listened and worked to build a program that makes career anddevelopment opportunities readily available to everyone.”
Rather than relying on the same subset of employees for highpriority projects, launching an agile workforce OS would allow
Mastercard’s leaders to work with talent that they may have otherwise
overlooked. “So thinking about not just the skills and the workforce

Customer success story: Mastercard

7

that’s immediate and right in front of us, but access to other pools oftalent,” Fraccaro says. By harnessing the talent marketplace within
their agile workforce OS, Mastercard sought to connect employees
to diverse projects that aligned with their career goals and the needsof the business.

If we can do this now and make this not just as astandalone moment, but really create this as thefabric of our workforce planning, workforce design,
upskilling, reskilling, democratizing our workforce,
there's something powerful here.
Michael Fraccaro
Chief People Officer

Customer success story: Mastercard

8The Solution
With their goals identified, Mastercard began searching for a solution
to equip leaders with complete skills visibility while simultaneously
powering internal talent matching. Ultimately, executives decided topartner with Gloat to turn their transformation vision into a reality.
In discussing the factors that influenced their decision, VP ofDigital Talent Heather Yurko explains, “What we learned fromthe conversations we had with Gloat was that they were thinking
holistically about where the platform was going. It’s not just about
our immediate needs, but also our longer-term vision.” As a selfdescribed “data nerd”, Yurko was particularly excited about the indepth analytics and comprehensive skills insights their forthcoming
platform would provide.

All of us have projects that we just don’t have thebandwidth to get done. Now it’s just out there that
I can go into a platform, log into a project, and awhole bunch of people raise their hands and saythey’ll get it done. How, I have no idea, but I know
they’ll deliver.
Rohit Chauhan
EVP of AI

Customer success story: Mastercard

9Following their decision, Mastercard partnered with Gloat’s Change& Enablement team to develop a phased launch plan for Unlocked,
their agile workforce OS. After a successful pilot, they rolled out
their platform to their entire workforce at the start of 2022—and use
cases and adoption haven’t slowed down since. Some key examples
include:Cutting-edge reskilling for the age of AI
Most companies know reskilling is necessary to thrive in the age ofAI—but few organizations are putting these training programs into
practice the way Mastercard is. “I’ve been able to take people on
from different areas of the business who don’t have a background inAI and train them in these skills,” notes Chauhan. “It’s an incredible
way to further diversify peoples’ career equity and give them moreskills than they would have if they kept working on the same thing,”
he says, in reference to Mastercard’s talent marketplace.

Seamless mergers and acquisitions
M&A presents plenty of opportunity for growth—and plenty ofchallenges. Fortunately, Mastercard has been able to overcome manyof the obstacles companies typically face post-deal by harnessing
their agile workforce OS to seamlessly integrate new employees’ skills
into their existing workforce. “In the past 6 or 7 years, we’ve bought
20 different companies,” notes Borgonovo.
“So Unlocked has been pretty integral to help integrate this newly
acquired talent into our organization. That has been an incredible
opportunity for us in terms of realizing the value of the acquisition andhelping drive a greater level of engagement and retention. Throughthe platform, people have been able to forge great relationships

Customer success story: Mastercard10and see that cross-fertilization of talent so acquired talent can findmentors within Mastercard.”

Major product innovations — withoutmajor risk
As an industry innovator for more than fifty years, Mastercard is nostranger to the challenges that come with debuting cutting-edge
products. As Chauhan explains, “Whenever you do product launches,
you have to think about how you can minimize risks.”
By harnessing Unlocked to compile cross-functional project teams,
Mastercard now benefits from a diverse array of perspectives that
help leaders troubleshoot and maximize the success of every launch.
“There’s nothing better than using this platform for [innovation]
because there are so many people looking at the product that if
there is something missing that’s not adding up, it will get raised bysomebody. So it’s absolutely brilliant from an innovation perspectivethat we can tap into the entire organization to help de-risk our productdevelopment framework,” Chauhan concludes.

Customer success story: Mastercard

11

The Results
31,740 work days saved in one year**

57% of Mastercard’s projects are related todeveloping new products and services

500,000+ unlocked hours$55,000,000 in unlocked productivity

By connecting employees to over 3,000 purpose-led careerdevelopment opportunities, Mastercard’s agile workforce OS has
unlocked its organization’s full potential—in turn leading to over
500,000 additional hours of capacity and a total of nearly 32,000
work days saved in one year. This impressive uptick in efficiency
has netted Mastercard an overall savings of $55 million dollars, as
leaders can now reduce their reliance on third-party contractors
and freelancers and instead tap into the diverse array of skills andexperiences their own workforce has to offer.

Customer success story: Mastercard

12Mastercard’s agile workforce OS began creating impact almost
immediately after it was launched, as Yurko recounts. “One of thethings that we saw right away upon opening up Unlocked was people’s
positive feedback on being able to meet colleagues they had neverknown before and their ability to do work that they had never even
known existed within the company. From the beginning, we had very
high rates of cross-functional and cross-regional partnerships.”
Less than one month after their global roll-out, Mastercard surpassed
a 50% adoption rate, a KPI that typically takes businesses at least six
months to achieve. Since then adoption rates have continued to soar,
with nearly 90% of Mastercard’s workforce currently registered on theplatform. In addition to an impressive array of statistics—including
saving almost 32,000 work days by reallocating employees to open
projects instead of waiting for full-time positions—Mastercard has agrowing number of use cases that speak to the success of their agile
workforce OS.

Customer success story: Mastercard13“Last year, the North American team reached out and said they
were short on Sales Associates and they needed someone to help
them meet their goal,” Chauhan recounts, telling one of his favorite
stories that highlights Mastercard’s ability to rapidly respond tochange. “One Product Manager from my team raised his hand…Andhonestly, initially, I just couldn’t picture him doing Sales. But he wasso successful that I was taken aback. Sometimes we think things won’t
work but you just have to give them a chance. We put ourselves inboxes and start drinking our own Kool-Aid, but I think these platforms
allow us to start thinking of boundaries much beyond.”
Reflecting on the profound changes that their agile workforce OS
has already set into motion, Fraccaro says, “With Unlocked, we cancollaborate across regions and business units, uncover new ideas,
challenge assumptions, and push one another to think in bold newways. Unlocked is allowing us to open up the boundaries of our teams
and expand our talent reach to ultimately grow and develop witheach other.”

From a business perspective, there is nothing moregratifying than to see that I can tap into every pocketof available resources and put them to use to create
value for our shareholders. That’s incredible.
Rohit Chauhan
EVP of AI

Customer success story: Mastercard

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Gloat’s Agile Workforce Operating System was built to help
companies transform and adapt to today’s world of work with more
dynamic operating models.
Are you ready to take your transformation journey to thenext level? Talk to an expert to find out how our AI-powered
technology can help your organization rapidly respondto change:

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Customer success story: Mastercard