Transforming Mastercard’s API Landscape Through Strategic Leadership and Customer-Centric Innovation
IT ALL BEGAN WITH A VISION...
Mastercard Developers stands as the premier platform facilitating customer-product connections for financial institutions and fintechs through web APIs. Offering a comprehensive range of services, from core transactions to value-added data and fraud prevention, spanning over a hundred diverse products, the platform is tailored to provide a self-service, developer-centric experience. Donal's instrumental role in shaping the success of Mastercard Developers is pivotal.
DONAL’S STRATEGIC CONTRIBUTIONS
Donal embarked on a journey to elevate the quality, consistency, and interoperability of Mastercard’s APIs by crafting a three-year strategic roadmap. His strategic insights played a central role in positioning Mastercard Developers as a go-to resource for customers.
Gathering Insights and Driving Change: Donal conducted a thorough analysis of customer pain points, culminating in an internal white paper outlining opportunities for enhancing developer experience, tooling, documentation, API design standards, and more.
Influencing Stakeholders and Building Teams: Demonstrating adept stakeholder influence, Donal secured resources and funding for the three-year strategic roadmap. He spearheaded the formation of a greenfield team of engineers and product owners, collaborating to create internal tools automating the quality and consistency of API specifications, documentation, API design, developer experience, and customer support.
Leadership in C-Suite Communications: Donal became a vital contributor to quarterly communications with the C-Suite management committee, showcasing the transformation of Mastercard’s API products into best-in-class API-first services, driving substantial revenue growth.
IMPACT AND ACHIEVEMENTS
Under Donal’s strategic leadership, the API program emerged as a benchmark for implementing organisational change within an enterprise, emphasizing the paramount importance of customer experience. This transformative approach significantly boosted Net Promoter Scores (NPS) by over 57% for API products.
Quality Focus and Customer Support Efficiency: A relentless commitment to API quality and consistency resulted in a remarkable 15% reduction in customer support tickets within the first year and a subsequent 31% reduction after three years.
Empowering Internal Teams: Understanding internal teams' needs, Donal introduced tooling that empowered engineers to promptly identify API design issues, automated the detection of documentation discrepancies, and provided detailed feedback through an assessment tool. This streamlined the time from inception to deployment of a new API product on Mastercard Developers by an impressive 30%.