Liz Oakes of Mastercard joins Alpesh Doshi to unpack the reality of payments innovation: why the front-end customer experience is the easy part, and the back end — accounting, settlement, risk, rules, regulation, sanctions, AML, KYC — is where the real complexity lives. They discuss why ~10-year change cycles are normal in payments, where fintechs win (UX) and where they struggle (business models), and the difference between meaningful disruption and disruption for its own sake. Recorded May 2021.
About the guest: Liz Oakes describes her path as “McDonald’s to McKinsey to Mastercard” — from general-management training, into the City, through roughly seven years in strategy consulting, to running “a startup within a very large organisation” at Mastercard. She favours selective, meaningful disruption over change for its own sake.
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