How critical is IT to MasterCard's success?

This has to be one of the best IT jobs in the world. A lot of companies struggle with: Are the IT goals aligned with the business goals? There's no difference here. Our IT goals are the business goals and unless we're absolutely linked, MasterCard doesn't function as effectively as it could.

Do you feel extra pressure because of that?

I think it's just the business we are in. The difference between the president's role and the CTO role [I previously had] is that you have to be thinking from a business standpoint all the time. How does any change we make help make the business be better for our customers, cardholders and merchants. How do we leverage technology to be better for all the stakeholders? It really drives the business.

For example, we have a group of people totally focused on the best kind of payment products [for banks], and they work with the IT guys to say: How do we best build that in our infrastructure? Then you have a team that's focused on working directly with the banks and saying: Here's the best MasterCard product for you. We may make tweaks to the IT infrastructure to make that the best possible service for the bank, but it really comes down to, for our group, our most important contribution to MasterCard is the quality, speed, strategy and innovation for those IT services we provide. And doing it at the very best possible cost.

What keeps you up at night?

I've given up sleeping. [Laughs] We don't have concerns, really, but we have some interesting opportunities we're focused on. We just announced a new processing platform called the Integrated Processing Solution, and the first customer went live yesterday. That one has been a big part of focus for last few months as we've been building this platform and bringing this customer up on it.

So is being innovative IT and enabling innovation throughout MasterCard a top priority for you?

Absolutely. It's part of the fun things about this job. This whole industry changes on a very fast basis. When you look at payments overall, the biggest opportunity we have is not against another payment process. It's with cash and check, because the majority of all payment transactions are still done via cash and check.

That's surprising. I travel with 10 bucks on me and my credit cards.

You see it declining at a very fast rate every year. But today over half of the transactions are cash and check.

How do you keep the staff motivated on keeping the network up 99.999 per cent of the time?

There's a phenomenon in this business: front of the wallet and back of the wallet. Most people in US carry more than one payment card. And if one payment card doesn't work, what do you typically do? You pull out the next one, right? And now that other card went to the front of your wallet. So one of the operating tenets that we have is that we never want to have a network issue that causes someone to move their card from front to back of wallet.

Does everyone at MasterCard walk around doing the "Priceless" bit? Or are you all sick of it?

No! We love that commercial! Actually I just had another one. When we introduced the new processing platform, we had a little takeoff on the "priceless" commercial again. It came down to, and I really believe this, that the technology people at MasterCard are priceless. You spend so much time at work, you have got to feel good about coming in the morning. If not, you're doing the wrong thing.