At Collaborate to Innovate: Unleashing the Potential of Partnerships with Mastercard’s Amnah Ajmal

Dubai, UAE: Mastercard has spent the past few years making a simple argument to the region’s businesses: nobody builds the future of payments alone. Its Collaborate to Innovate platform, a digital-first event series produced with CNBC, was built around that idea, bringing telcos, fintechs, retailers and other non-traditional players into the same conversation as banks. Few people inside Mastercard carry that message as consistently as Amnah Ajmal, Executive Vice President, Market Development, for Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (EEMEA).

A Platform Built Around Partnership

Collaborate to Innovate began as a virtual event during the pandemic. CNBC Africa’s coverage of a February 2021 edition described it as bringing together C-suite leaders, telcos, fintechs, retailers and airlines to talk about how collaboration could speed up digital transformation in Africa. The campaign behind it, run with Weber Shandwick MENAT, was later entered in the Middle East Public Relations Association awards, which noted more than 1,000 participants.

The goal was simple enough: show Mastercard as the technology partner that connects telcos, e-tailers and fintechs with their customers, and use that reach to widen financial inclusion across the region.

Why Non-Traditional Partners Matter

Ajmal has been making the same point for years. “Today, non-financial institutions are offering financial services,” she told Finance Middle East in March 2024. Mastercard’s job, as she describes it, is to give those companies the technology they need to do it well.

In a January 2023 article for Mastercard, she listed who is involved: “We work with different players in the industry including fintechs, retailers, telcos, banks and governments.” Mastercard connects startups and small businesses with larger organisations that already use its products, and in her words, “By giving them the tools that they need to grow, we are shaping a superior consumer value proposition together.”

Telcos as a Bridge to Financial Access

Telecom operators sit at the centre of this approach. “We partner with companies such as Vodafone in the UAE and Egypt, MTN in Africa, Orange and Airtel,” Ajmal told Intelligent Fin.tech in November 2024. In her view, telcos have “unique data, agility and insights into their customers”, which lets them assess small businesses and individuals using alternative data such as geolocation and mobile transactions.

That has changed what telcos can offer. “Previously, small loans from telecoms were limited to airtime top-ups,” she said. “Now, they can extend flexible micro-loans that empower SMEs to grow.” With e&, Mastercard helped launch a virtual card linked to a mobile money wallet, which Ajmal described as “an initiative completed in a record five weeks from concept to launch.” The two companies are also working together on digital payment services across 16 markets, and Mastercard has partnered with MTN Group Fintech to bring secure mobile payments to people and small businesses across Africa.

Fintechs and Banks: Filling Each Other’s Gaps

Ajmal sees fintechs and traditional institutions as two halves of the same picture. “Most FinTechs, though lacking in scale, dive deeply into specific issues and solve them exceptionally well,” she said, while banks bring the scale. Relationships matter as much as products: “As I often say, people do business with people, not companies.”

Mastercard backs emerging innovators through programmes such as Start Path and Fintech Express, and offers fintechs loyalty solutions, AI tools to help them make use of their data, and cyber risk resources to manage today’s threats and prepare for new ones.

Inclusion and Trust at the Core

Ajmal frames Mastercard’s work in the region around three pillars: driving innovation, expanding inclusion and building trust. On security, she has said: “We are securing the entire payments ecosystem with end-to-end encryption, tokenisation and authentication.”

Inclusion targets have shaped many of these partnerships. Mastercard pledged to bring one billion people and 50 million micro, small and medium-sized businesses into the digital economy by 2025, and it reached its goal of equipping 25 million women entrepreneurs in June 2023, two years ahead of schedule. “Empowering female-led businesses remains a key focus area for Mastercard and me personally,” Ajmal has said.

Looking Ahead

Her advice to women building careers in fintech and banking is short: “Be bold and persevere.” For Mastercard, the direction is just as clear. “In the coming years, I see us continuing our journey of powering economies and empowering people,” she said.

That journey, as Collaborate to Innovate set out to show, runs through partners. For Ajmal, the companies best placed to widen access to finance in the region are not always banks, and Mastercard’s role is to give all of them the technology to do it.