Mastercard’s SVP of Global Products on How to Enter New Markets

Read The Transcript:

We’re trying out transcribing our podcasts using a software program. Please forgive any typos as the bot isn’t correct 100% of the time.

Hannah Clark: Scaling internationally has never been an easy proposition, but today, the challenges can hardly be overstated. We live in a time of economic uncertainty, tariffs, and regulations that change as often as the weather. But businesses are meant to grow and sometimes an overseas opportunity seems too good to pass up. And, as we’ll cover in this episode, they certainly can be—for now. But if you consider all the unknowns of doing business in a foreign market, plus the piece of change both here and abroad, the only thing you can really be sure of is that you WILL have blind spots—and more are sure to develop.

But that’s where my guest comes in. Simone Tamussin is the SVP Product Management for Mastercard Gateway, and as someone who works closely with businesses in this position, he’d be the first to say that every day demands a whole new set of solutions. He offers a high-level view of the challenges that catch growth-minded leaders off-guard, proactive measures for safely entering new markets, and ideas for efficiently tackling the astonishing pile of paperwork that stands between you and your global expansion initiatives. Let’s jump in.

Oh by the way, we hold conversations like this every week. So if this sounds interesting to you, why not subscribe? Okay, now let’s jump in.

Welcome back to The CPO Club podcast. I’m here today with Simone Tamussin and he is here representing a Mastercard Gateway.

Thank you so much for making the time in your busy schedule to be here with us.

Simone Paul Tamussin: Oh, absolutely. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Hannah Clark: So today we’re gonna be focusing on what enterprise leaders need to know when entering new markets internationally, which is a very complex topic that we’ll be digging in today.

Simone, can you kick us off with an anecdote that outlines some of the gaps between the assumptions and reality that you’ve seen trip up leaders who are in the process of pursuing global expansion?

Simone Paul Tamussin: Oh, yeah, absolutely. We have a few good ones that I’ve been in mind during my life and during my career, but let’s see. One thing that usually happens is especially if you’re successful in a lot of countries already, you give for granted. Like that things work in a certain way, that your standards are the ones that can work in each single country.

As an example, once we, so I work in the payment gateway, so we need to try to implement new payment methods. I don’t implement only Mastercard, any type of payment, pretty much agnostic from that point of view. So many years ago what happened, we were trying to enter in a new market and we didn’t have like local expertise or knowledge of what was happening there.

And we had to implement a local domestic scheme. So a car network that is, that was available in the country. What happened? We gave for granted that it was going to work. Oh, we deal with Mastercard, we deal with Visa, American Express. We know our stuff, so it should work as we do it every day. And that was terrible as an assumption because once we start to dig in, the work was going on and at the time the platform was less modern than the one that we have right now.

Yeah, the things weren’t great. So what turned out to be like a small project was going to be a completely longer one, like almost taking a year and a half with a lot of millions to be invested and that basically killed. The business case to entering that country and customers immediately start to go away to some other players.

So that was one kind of example. Another one, sometimes it happens also on technology standards or like security standards. Another we give for granted that maybe what we need to adopt, what we are using for, I dunno, key exchanges or certificates, works for everyone. But sometimes in some countries, the regulator, especially if you need to deal with the local regulator and the regulator is working in a different way, good luck with trying to say, Hey, how is the best practice you should adopt and you should change your systems. That doesn’t fly well. Yeah.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, fair enough. I can only imagine dealing with regulators is yeah, probably a little bit of a oil and water situation often.

Let’s talk about scaling a product into new regions. What signals do you look for that indicate that there might be a risk involved that’s maybe unforeseen at that moment or that there might be some geopolitical or volatility that might become a risk for the product?

Simone Paul Tamussin: Yeah, there are definitely several factors, and I can tell you like the last five years things have become crazy and every day is becoming even more complex. So you have different type of forces that are going maybe in opposite directions or clashing or combined as an effect. So you have the technology side, of course evolution of the technologies.

Are the countries ready? How is the scenario in that country? Definitely in terms of regulations, so our work in a super regulated industry, and I have everything, if it talks about like your data, it talks about how you manage payments. Anything that could be impacting our area. We were talking about like the forces from a localization perspective, nationalism.

Is there a push to protect like local players? Is there a resistance to send data outside or to protect like everything and try to keep everything into the domestic environment? That’s something that is impacting and changing on a daily basis. Last but not least, I would say economical pressure.

Even tariffs, even changes or dynamics that are happening across the world because we deal with payments, commerce, and so on. Assumptions that we had yesterday could be completely wrong tomorrow. So yeah, those are the things and we really need to step up and monitor and. Think about this and we set up like almost a team that is a complex team that is looking to try to anticipate everything that is happening in a single country.

Hannah Clark: I think this is really timely. This, obviously, this has been on everyone’s mind. Just the insane volatility, especially in the last little while.

So you’ve mentioned before I’ve heard you use the word regulation killing your business case overnight. And I’m thinking about this in terms of, how do we evaluate risk when we’re expanding into a heavily regulated region, especially when we have limited resources.

And then my hang around question to that is how do we continue to give an ongoing view on where some of our markets are changing when we’ve we’ve got many markets that we’re overseeing at the same time?

Simone Paul Tamussin: Yeah, no. One thing that you know for sure is you need to be able to adapt and you need to be able to have some degree of flexibility and also be open to work with potentially local players.

Share like the part of your business with someone else if you want to start to get into that and into the country in that region. So the business model that you have maybe in 80% of the countries you are already present. If you want to get in. The other ones, you maybe need to reach some compromises and work.

Maybe some players that in the past, in some other countries are competitors with you, but there could be like able to give you access to what’s happening there. I feel that it’s important. To do like a thorough analysis when you enter in a country, especially for payments and regulated industries. So if I had to invest some money, I would definitely invest it like in legal consultants, regulation, data privacy, trying to cover these aspects and understand if, how big is the risk for you for entering that market?

And also try to anticipate like. We were saying like the political environment, is it going to change potentially the things that the legal council is giving me now, are they potentially changing in two to three months and then is going to completely change the impact on my business case? So these are all the things that you need to take into account when expanding into a new country.

Hannah Clark: I did wanna pro a little bit more on one thing that you mentioned about partnering, it sounds to me like you’re suggesting that potentially partnering with someone who’s already in that market who otherwise would be a competitor. What might that look like? Do you have an example of something like that’s happened in practice?

Simone Paul Tamussin: Yeah. I can’t make names, but there are different types of scenario. Let’s, I can talk, of course, also how I see it personally for the job that I am or my company and so on. And there are two different things in some cases. It’s easier to work with someone that is locally there that has maybe already done the integration with, I know the local domestic scheme or is working with the switching other processing companies that are mandated by the regulator or the government.

Why? Because maybe they have already built. Connections and they are able to influence, they have a good relationship with entities, the regulators that are there in the country. So that’s one thing that sometimes you need to evaluate, and I usually do when our team usually does. Another thing that could happen is like more selfishly is when we were talking probably sometimes about compliance as a service as well is, let’s say, if I am forced to do that kind of investment already, maybe because I have wider interests, because I’m Mastercard or another company that have other businesses that are in that country, so I need to support also the other ones. So I’ll need to do that massive investment.

Then why don’t I play myself the role of providing that access to some other players that would not be able to make. That investment in technology, in resources, in people location, and I collaborate and is like of course a different type of dynamic. As I was saying, maybe we are competitors. My business unit is a competitor with someone in country A, but in country C, it makes sense for them to leverage my services or embedded payments or how, or compliance as a service and then they’re able to enter the market as well.

Hannah Clark: That’s interesting how that kind of a dynamic can make something that could be a competitive angle. Maybe better as a strategic partnership play.

We’re talking a little bit about things that pertain more to enterprise leaders, but when we’re talking about like a smaller business that’s beginning to scale into an international market for the first time, what are some of the mistakes that you’ve seen repeated when it comes to a newer player who is starting to scale into larger markets?

What are things that those kinds of startup leaders and scale up leaders should be aware of?

Simone Paul Tamussin: Yeah, so definitely underestimating some parts of compliance may be thinking that you can delay some aspects of this until after launch or after a year we will take care of it. Let’s immediately get there.

Let’s scale the revenues. Let’s grow as fast as possible. It can happen in many countries. It’s the case, the right approach, and maybe regulations are still not there. And you have like enough lead time to build like enough revenues to then. Work on this later, but in some other cases you maybe do this approach and two months after the regulator is coming with a completely different changing completely the rules of the game and this is going to impact another thing that I think is really important to understand, it’s especially in payments, is not that you’re just bringing your product to another country and that’s it.

You are basically embedding yourself in the local ecosystem of the payments. It’s a different type of mindset, so you need to get intel. You need to understand, and that’s the part that you can, of course, from a startup perspective, if you are agile, nimble, and you are able to address compliance, but also work on the inefficiencies that the incumbents have.

Maybe you can transform that in an opportunity for yourself because you cover the compliance. You can deal with any changes that the regulators are doing, and you’re faster than most of the incumbents that are there. So you can turn it to your advantage, but don’t underestimate some components of it.

Hannah Clark: Is this that a situation in which that sort of compliance as a service might be a good strategy to Kinda, yeah?

Simone Paul Tamussin: In the same way as I was saying before example, I’m a big player and some others could see me, I’m a competitor. In some cases it could be a partner, but it could, same thing could happen like for a smaller, an enterprise or a startup.

Like what could they do? Who could they look there to help them to scale? We know about like banking as a service embedded finance that helped so many fintechs to scale in many markets like Europe, United States and so on. You could have a similar approach. So try to identify who can help you there.

Are they reliable, are they trusted? And how can they help you take away some of that kind of work so you can bring what’s your expertise, where you really good at, but still be protected from any kind of compliance or regulation that is there. So definitely try to go and find if there’s the right partner for you there.

Hannah Clark: Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about using large language models. This, of course, there’s always an AI component to every conversation this time of our lives. So you’ve mentioned that using those kinds of tools can be really useful for doing geopolitical and regulatory research when we’re trying to understand the environment that we’re about to enter into.

Give me an example of how those kinds of tools can be effective at completing some of those. I know a lot of folks have qualms right now with using LLMs for research purposes or making sure that those outputs are accurate. So how would you advise that folks use those kinds of tools to conduct that kind of research when they’re investigating?

Simone Paul Tamussin: Yeah, I found that like especially the deep research type of functionalities are really helpful if you’re on the startup, on the, trying to prioritize which markets do we enter, like what are the forces and you can access information that is pretty good, reliable, of course, not at the level of the detailed data as example us in Mastercard we have with our teams and our presence locally.

But it can give you like a thirst mapping of the threats and what’s going to be impacting your business cases, what you need to focus on. So that at the point, going back to the point I said before, if you need to invest some money into, some local expertise and something, you can decide which countries to go and make that investment.

And other areas like let’s say, you’ve made investments and you’re going in different countries. So I’m in more than a hundred countries. And if you even just search, as I said, as we said before with LLM, you can see that there are probably more than 60 domestic schemes from a car point of view.

They’re more than 100 from account tokin type of payment methods. Now, most of them are regulated by the governments. All of them are releasing mandates and letters on a daily basis. On top of this, you have schemes like Mastercard, visa, American Express, that they’re releasing their stuff. So it’s thousands of letters and documents.

So how can you leverage one thing that we’re pushing a lot and trying to optimize is like, how can we leverage LMS to support us in. Understanding, reading through and understanding impact on our app, on our systems, on our customers, and how to accelerate and compress the time. You need to think that also the expertise, if you rely on individuals to go through all those letters, all those documents is really difficult to find.

People that know technology from one side understand your business and on the other side are have that legal compliance lens and can bring the two things together. So sometimes it would be ideal to have a solution that helps you to, get there to the right position and protect yourself if some of your key resources are leaving your business, because that’s another key important thing like that knowledge, where is it going? How can you protect it and how to scale up again?

Hannah Clark: I’ve seen some similar kind of concepts echoed by some of the folks that we’ve had on the show who are in the user research space where they’re trying to, condense an enormous amount of user research data. And it’s just not realistic often to be able to accurately parse, a thousand pieces of customer feedback into a clear, concise recommendation.

So I can see how a similar kind of approach could be really effective for parsing through like an enormous amount of compliance data and trying to make sense of it in a way that’s clear and transmittable.

Simone Paul Tamussin: And also with that timing, because what we are finding more and more is like many of these regulators or schemes are releasing something and then they ask you to do it in the next six months or like in four months.

If it takes you like already two months to digest all the thousands of letters and mandates, just imagine like how timely can you be in delivering what you need to do for, to be compliant. So that’s another aspect to keep in mind. Of course, training validation, super important because you’re dealing with compliance.

If you get it wrong, is there other hallucination or things are going in the wrong direction? Like you could also fail big time. So make sure that you do all the right checks. Don’t rely 100% on what’s coming out from LLMs.

Hannah Clark: Okay, so this is a really interesting one to look into a little bit closer because this is an area I’m not really sure how people are handling this right now. How do you, first of all, I think it’s wonderful that we have tools that are able to move at the speed of change at this stage in our political landscape.

But at the same time, I wonder at an enterprise level, how are you able to conduct checks on accuracy and outputs and that kind of thing when there’s such an enormous amount of information that’s so nuanced according to the different regulatory bodies that have mandated this kind of work?

Simone Paul Tamussin: It’s difficult, it’s tough to crack the code. We’re not yet there. It’s a learning journey in my personal view is like investing a lot, reviewing training and giving more information and saying of even the ones that’s giving back to you that, oh, this does not apply to your company and your, and to your customers.

Have a review of that because you’re missing something. It’s better almost to implement something that is not needed than to not implement something and then being hit by a compliance regulator that is stopping you to do from doing business. So try to focus on those ones. Is it right? If it’s wrong, go back and retrain the model and continue and have those quality checks.

So you will need, always need supervision from in from human point of view. That’s my view. But you can accelerate and produce much more, much faster. It’s definitely not easy.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, absolutely. I’m sure, not easy, but compared to the alternative of doing it all manually is actually impossible.

Simone Paul Tamussin: And especially when you, when with the multiplication, like of all these schemes and all the regulators and everything, so it’s yeah. 10 years ago is, it was much an easier job to do this kind of work.

Hannah Clark: Yeah. I can only imagine.

So speaking of, antiquated processes and moving into the future, how do you align cross-functional teams across markets that move at different speeds and under different laws and with varying levels of maturity given that things are changing so quickly and it’s difficult to keep people aligned on even one change often rather than, just the multitude of factors that these teams are having to deal with now?

Simone Paul Tamussin: Yeah. Let’s say from the teams that are, let’s say, our domains where product and engineers are working together is helping them understand. These dynamics, training them and trying to push them to find what are the things that can help us scale and be adaptable and flexible, and is there a common factor that then we can use to then bring in each country, in each region, and then manage the differences with the s implementations, partnerships or the incremental that needs to happen there.

So that’s from the technology side and trying to explain this kind of flexibility and the what happens if you don’t do that. On the other side, partnerships from partnership locally, it’s important understanding the dynamics. Even if you are the best technology person, the best product manager, but you are in the location and you don’t understand some of the dynamics that are happening there locally, or what’s happening between the regulator and the players, the lobbying forces, that’s going to impact a lot.

So a lot of communication, a lot of understanding, a lot of training, cross training, cross contamination. Then trying to get to the right solution for each specific country in specific region. And as I said, technologically, try to make it as flexible as possible. Don’t pretend that what works there, you can just deploy it and implement it everywhere else because you’re probably going to fail.

Hannah Clark: What I’m hearing here, there’s a theme of an abundance of caution in all factors. I think you may have heard we had a episode with Craig Guarraci about too long ago who talked about interacting with global teams and the complexities even of working with folks who are working on your team internal, technically, working from global markets and the differences in culture to take into account just when communicating objectives, so.

Simone Paul Tamussin: Yeah, and in some cases there could also be another interesting aspect where if you go there, you show that you are, you bring the right solutions, you are happy to collaborate. You can probably sit down almost to co-create with who is creating, like in the domestic scheme, who is creating the new rules and defining what good looks like to help the entire ecosystem.

So if you are able to play and inject yourself there, of course the role that then you play later in the country is going to be much, much easier, much more important, much more relevant. Then going back to the collaboration that we were saying before and partnerships or like a compliance as a service.

If you identify those players that have this kind of relationship, and then you’re probably going to be able to scale and enter the market, yeah, in a better and easier way.

Hannah Clark: When we’re thinking about, again, going back into our enterprise product leader mindset, what are some of the things when we’re thinking about the way that things are done now versus the way that things have been done for many years prior to just the world changing and the scale of, or the pace of change just accelerating so much.

What are some of the things or processes that we need to unlearn or rethink about when we’re moving to operate in mature markets and operate into emerging ones?

Simone Paul Tamussin: Yeah definitely like scaling is not simple, that you need to learn that as a leader. And you need to probably think that processes that could work for you maybe 10 years ago, standardize everything across even wider enterprises. Good luck with those, especially if they compress you with too much paperwork and too much bureaucracy. People know that usually that I’m not a huge fan of scale, the Jet Framework or other frameworks that are creating too much paperwork or creating like long plannings, quarterly plannings.

Almost roadmaps, and everything committed for several months. Because I need to pivot and change almost on a weekly basis or daily basis with things that are coming out. So I completely think about differently from the past. You don’t bring your products, as we said before, you need to embed yourself there in the local system, and to do this.

Your technology, your processes need to be able to adapt and be flexible because you have a global team managing product and managing engineering, and they need to be able to have a, like a different approach based on different type of region. And maybe some companies will prefer to have teams that are dedicated in each single region and managing the, I know the functionalities and the platforms.

That are there, or you have as I two have like more centralized teams, product and engineering teams, but that they are able to change the approach based on the country and the needs that are there.

Hannah Clark: So to sum up here, what we’re really, our recommendations really are to remain as flexible as possible, continue to keep your processes as flexible as possible. Investigate the option of looking into strategic partnerships with people operating in local markets rather than trying to build from scratch as much as possible. What am I missing?

Simone Paul Tamussin: Keep it going. Like a lot of excitement, a lot of energy every day every moment. So continue with the passion and the energy. That’s definitely one thing.

Hannah Clark: Yeah. Yeah. I suppose you’ll definitely need it to keep up this space of change.

Simone Paul Tamussin: And probably yeah, using like 20 years or more being in this industry, and sometimes I ask myself why, but then it isn’t because every day it’s a different type of challenge.

It’s almost, some of those games apps that try to keep your brain active. I think that I have enough of that we trying to deal payments across this global landscape that we have right now.

Hannah Clark: Alright, I’m glad that it’s keeping you sharp. Oh, thank you for joining us. Where can listeners follow your work online, Simone?

Simone Paul Tamussin: Yeah definitely LinkedIn is the best place to reach out to me, follow what I’m doing, follow Mastercard Gateway with all the things that we’re doing in the different countries, different regions that will be super interesting. And Mastercard overall also publishes a lot of content around how we’re supporting unlocking payment methods everywhere.

And of course, a lot of news coming out from the recent days as well, so super exciting times.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, lots to dig into. Thank you so much for making time for us.

Simone Paul Tamussin: Yeah, no problem. Thank you, Hannah.

Hannah Clark: Thanks for listening in. For more great insights, how-to guides and tool reviews, subscribe to our newsletter at theproductmanager.com/subscribe. You can hear more conversations like this by subscribing to The CPO Club wherever you get your podcasts.