In 2025, a group of Mastercard Australia employees won the company’s global CEO Force for Good Award, the massive internal recognition led by Mastercard’s CEO that honours employee-led initiatives delivering measurable social impact in communities around the world.
The winning project sits in Hawkesbury, on Sydney’s north-western edge: eight digital workstations, rebuilt from decommissioned Sydney Tech Hub equipment (an afterlife most office hardware never gets), where around 100 people experiencing homelessness now get weekly access to job applications and housing support.
The same group, the ADAPTability employee resource group, also recruited 40 volunteers to distribute thousands of meals with Hawkesbury Helping Hands and Foodbank New South Wales.
The award citation reads like a project report, and that says a lot about the company. Community work here gets owners, equipment and usage data, and the same habit governs how the company manages its people. Mastercard Australia has just been named to the inaugural Best Workplaces in Finance and Insurance 2026 list, with 90 per cent of Australian staff proud to work there, with 88 per cent happy to recommend it.
Values with a performance review attached
Mastercard launched The Mastercard Way in late 2022, three behaviours named Create Value, Grow Together and Move Fast. The consequential decision came in 2023, when those behaviours went into the performance management system, so employees are now assessed on how they achieve results as well as what they deliver.
The survey data suggests it stuck. In Australia, 92 per cent of employees say they know how to demonstrate the behaviours in their own objectives, and 95 per cent of new joiners believe the company has a strong culture. For a 39,000-person global organisation, where a local office can drift from head office priorities for a year before anyone notices, those are unusual numbers.
The internal job market
Growth opportunity is the top documented reason people stay, and the company has built the machinery to match. Unlocked, an internal talent marketplace launched in 2022, lets employees apply for short-term projects and mentorships across the business.
Australia created 34 Unlocked projects in 2025, 77 per cent of the mentoring pairs were cross-functional, and globally one in three employees who complete an Unlocked project goes on to make a career move. Con Vafeas, a project owner in the Products team, said: “Unlocked was a godsend at a time when my team was stretched thin.” Australasia recorded 150 career moves, upward and lateral, in 2025.
For graduates, the 18-month Launch Program produces alumni who are promoted faster than peers who arrived by other routes. Prosple ranked Mastercard second in technology in its 2025 Top 100 Graduate Employers, and LinkedIn named it a 2026 Top Company for career growth.
Inclusion that ships product
Two Mastercard card features started life in employee resource groups. True Name, which lets cardholders display their chosen name on the card, was developed with the PRIDE ERG and now operates in more than 33 markets. Touch Card, a tactile standard for people who are blind or partially sighted, came through ADAPTability, and Westpac became the first Australian bank to issue it in 2023. Sally Aurisch, chief executive of Blind Citizens Australia, called it proof of “the impact these small yet simple measures can have.”
Australia runs five local ERGs, covering disability, cultural diversity, women’s leadership, LGBTQIA+ employees and young professionals. When ADAPTability and Autism Spectrum Australia held a World Autism Month event at the Sydney Tech Hub in April 2024, the first region-wide event of its kind, more than 300 employees turned up.
The Sydney Tech Hub does real product development, including Global Acceptance and a Security Operations Centre. On flexibility, more than half of Australasian employees used the Work from Elsewhere benefit in 2025, up to 20 days a year from any location, for a combined 5,745 days.
Why people choose Mastercard
In the company’s own candidate research, 33 per cent cited social impact as a key reason for applying. Australian employees logged more than 550 volunteer days in 2025, and the Harding Miller Education Foundation partnership brings 19 students from disadvantaged backgrounds into the Tech Hub for week-long programs that end with the students presenting to real Mastercard clients.
The global numbers supply the rest of the pitch. Mastercard has connected roughly one billion people to the digital economy since 2015 and declined more than 70 billion fraudulent transactions in the past decade.
For HR leaders benchmarking against industry peers, though, the most telling figure is smaller. Ninety-five per cent of new joiners rate the culture strong before they have sat through a single performance cycle. Whatever is set up at the beginning, it holds.
