MasterCard’s chief information officer tells Dan Barnes of his healthy state of paranoia, which compels him to keep up to date with developments in the market place.
When W. Roy Dunbar was appointed chief information officer at Mastercard in September 2004, his chief executive officer Robert Selander specifically drew attention to his experience in “sales, marketing, product development and general management”.
In this, Mr Dunbar is representative of the shift in the role of CIO from a heavy focus on pure technology to that of communicator. As befitting someone of his cross-business skill set, he stresses the need to talk with the enterprise as a whole: “It is critical that a CIO has a good feeling for technology but I certainly see myself as an interlocutor at times. It is invaluable for a CIO to be able to communicate with the sub-cultures that you can find within different areas of an enterprise.”
Leadership skills
Two years on and the need for his style of leadership has been borne out. Having completed the upgrade of MasterCard’s transaction system, Banknet, under the Systems Enhancement Project – “basically a re-write of all the critical code of our clearing and settlement systems at the very heart of our transaction processing capability” – Mr Dunbar has extended this to the roll-out of a new authorisation system.
Under the title of Global Authorisation Initiative, the project is now well under way and should facilitate cross-border payments, compliance with the Single Euro Payments Area regulation and serve global banks seeking a one-stop-shop approach to connectivity with Mastercard.
“We’re standardising our systems so that banks have to talk to us only once, [and] have to talk to one set of systems so [customer] costs will be moderated and they will see benefits in terms of speed and agility.”
As can be expected in a company with the multiple facets of MasterCard, there appears to be little rest in the technology area – conversation with Mr Dunbar gives a sense of perpetual motion.
While ensuring that the infrastructure for the company is always improving, MasterCard has also entered the contactless payments market with PayPass, its low-value payments system, released over the course of the last year to good effect in the US and around the world.
The pick-up from both banks and customers appears to be strong. However, Mr Dunbar has a marked lack of complacency: “I think of myself as healthily paranoid – you have to keep constant track of the market place, of consumers, of the competition.”
He recalls an example of how this can go wrong from an interview he read with rock musician Jon Bon Jovi. “He had been in the business a while, and he was certain that he was writing sure-fire hit songs. However, when his next album came out it flopped. He said: ‘We took a swipe and we missed big’. There is a lesson there – you cannot know where the consumer is going to go.”
Standardised systems
In keeping with this, MasterCard has developed standardised transmission of money for PayPass rather than building specific devices. This allows suppliers to include the system in just about any device, although key-fobs and traditional cards have had the greatest uptake.
Where he can be confident is in the potential for the payments market. “We are still seeing growth in the cards market. If you look at debit cards in the US, the average growth rate, year-on-year, in debit transactions is in the range of 15%-17% while we see half of that in credit card transactions.”
He expects competition in the payments area will grow from the non-traditional players – whether online such as Google and Ebay, or telecom companies – but says his focus is to facilitate choice and let the consumer decide.
“I do not want to presuppose the future. The hard ground on which you stand today may be soft ground tomorrow.”
CAREER HISTORY
2005: Elected to the board of directors of Humana Incorporated
2004: Elected to the board of directors of EDS Corporation
2004: Joins MasterCard and oversees its strategic processing platform, global network and quality of operations
2004: President of Eli Lilly’s Intercontinental Region, with responsibility for operations in Africa, the Middle East, the Commonwealth of Independent States, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean
2003: Information Week names him chief information officer of the year
1999: Vice-president of information technology and chief information officer at Eli Lilly
1990: Joins Eli Lilly as market research analyst
1990: MBA from the Manchester Business School, UK
1983: Pharmacist, Boots the Chemist, UK
1982: Pharmacy degree from Manchester University, UK
