What's Next In Mastercard

In the latest episode of “What’s Next In,” Mastercard’s podcast that informally explores technology, innovation and ideas, host Vicki Hyman talks with Brandon “Stix” Salaam-Bailey, the Watts-born-and-bred hip-hop artist who is the force behind the ThinkWatts Foundation, the nonprofit delivering an ever-expanding range of programs — from weekly food distribution, environmental justice initiatives, and coding, financial education and entrepreneurship workshops, to name a few — to underserved residents in his community, where the poverty rate is more than twice the national average, and beyond. On the podcast, Stix shares his journey from rapper and producer to activist and social entrepreneur, highlighting some of the success stories he’s shepherded through ThinkWatts, his plans for the foundation’s future, and his reflections on the community that forged him.

In the latest episode of “What’s Next In,” Mastercard’s podcast that informally explores technology, innovation and ideas, host Vicki Hyman chats with Einat Haftel, the chief product officer at Dynamic Yield, the AI-powered experience operating system that helps companies build hyper-personalized digital experiences with great agility and speed. And in a modern world where personalization is key, Shopping Muse, Dynamic Yield’s new virtual digital assistant driven by generative AI, is bringing a new edge to conversational commerce.
“You can go into a store, talk to consultant, say, ‘I have light features and want this makeup,’ and they help you, but you can't do that when you shop online. Shopping Muse is designed to solve exactly that,” she says. Haftel also discusses the future of personalization, how AI is evolving and how that is changing how people interact with it and trust its outputs. “I think AI will actually start to be empathic to the user and we are going to see people adapt,” she says.
 

In the latest episode of “What’s Next In,” Mastercard’s podcast that informally explores technology, innovation and ideas, host Vicki Hyman chats with Nitendra Rajput, senior vice president and head of Mastercard’s AI Garage, which applies AI at scale across Mastercard, developing new algorithms and collaborating with teams to design and develop new products and services.
Rajput discusses the way cyber criminals are capitalizing on AI, how the company is accelerating the adoption of AI through innovative partnerships, and why it’s critical to put in place guardrails to ensure AI is used responsibly. A researcher and prolific patent developer who started his career in speech recognition, Rajput says AI can help us better understand the world around us – and perhaps better understand ourselves as well.

In the latest episode of “What’s Next In,” Mastercard’s podcast that informally explores technology, innovation and ideas, host Vicki Hyman chats with Mastercard's Tara Nathan, the  founder of Community Pass, a digital infrastructure that increases access to critical services including healthcare, agriculture and micro-commerce for people in underserved, remote, and frequently offline communities.
As world leaders gather in New York City for the U.N. General Assembly to discuss how to accelerate action on the sustainable development goals, including reducing poverty, hunger, and inequality, Nathan discusses the role the private sector can play in delivering services in a commercially sustainable and scalable way and how people can harness digitization and their own data to improve their lives and livelihoods.
"We're peeling back the layers to a problem and creating solutions," Nathan says. "Digitization is helping to bring critical services and brighter opportunities to people in developing markets — and Mastercard is working to bridge the stiff digital divide."
 

In the latest episode of “What’s Next In,” Mastercard’s podcast that informally explores technology, innovation and ideas, host Vicki Hyman chats with Steve Flinter, vice president for artificial intelligence, machine learning and quantum computing at Mastercard, and Murray Thom, vice president of quantum business innovation at D-Wave, the British Colombia-based company that develops and delivers quantum computing systems, software and services. 
They discuss the challenges of evolving quantum computing from the theoretical to the practical — “You’re trying to harness and control the most fundamental properties of the universe at the smallest possible level,” Flinter says — as well as D-Wave’s partnership with Mastercard and other corporations to explore potential use cases while mitigating potential pitfalls often inherent in emerging tech.

Today, there are more real-time digital transactions in India than the U.S., China and Europe combined. That’s a testament to the country’s enormous size — it recently passed China to become world’s most populous nation — but even more so, it’s a testament to the country’s embrace of digitization.  In the latest episode of “What’s Next In,” Mastercard’s podcast that informally explores technology, innovation and ideas, host Vicki Hyman chats with Gautam Aggarwal, division president, South Asia, and Mastercard’s country corporate officer for India.
Aggarwal gives us his take on the evolution of the once largely-agrarian economy into one of the world’s great technology hubs, the government’s Digital India initiative and digital public infrastructure, and the partnerships Mastercard is forging to move that vision forward for the microentrepreneurs and small business owners, both in rural and urban areas, that are the backbone of the Indian economy. “If you won't do the right things, by being inclusive, you won't be able to scale,” he says. “It’s almost become the beacon for the rest of the world and showing to the rest of the word how to do it right.”