Mastercard Advisors Interview Questions, Process, and Tips

• Q1. Guesstimate simple
  Add Answer
• Q2. Behavior questions
  Add Answer

Banking industry related case

• Q1. Exaplain about PGDBA programme
  Add Answer
• Q2. Explain DBSCAN.
  View Answers (1)
• Q3. Explain KNn models and its difference to K-means
  View Answers (1)
• Q4. What features will you take into consideration while designing a time series model.
  View Answers (1)
• Q5. Explain about the contest you have won in the past, which ML models have you applied
  View Answers (1)

• Q1. Introduce yourself.
  View Answers (1)
• Q2. How has your day been?
  Add Answer
• Q3. How many processes have you gone through till now?
  Add Answer
• Q4. What projects have you done till now which makes you think you are fit for consulting?
  View Answers (1)
• Q5. Could you please explain the CDF project.
  View Answers (2)

Mastercard wants to launch a loyalty product for an e-commerce player. Tell me how you would go about it and how we can select the partner.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate]

C: Could you give me details about what kind of loyalty product do you have in your mind?

I: This is like Smart Buy which HDFC and Mastercard have launched. (She also told me about the portal and the card's benefits.)

C: (I basically thought of going by 4P approach and wrote down some factors to be considered for each head. communicated this to the interviewer.) Do you want me to evaluate the benefits of launching the loyalty card and what forms of benefits could be provided?

I: No, That's fine. Let us just focus on how you will select the e-commerce partner and which one.

C: I would like to focus on the current offerings on different platforms and then comparing them with some benefits that we could provide. There are some other factors that we need to consider like Flipkart having its own loyalty program- super coins and said that this would cause difficulty in partnering with them.

I: Why are you looking only at Flipkart or Amazon. Do you know what an e-commerce platform means?

C: There are different aggregators in various categories like transport, food, and others, giving examples.

I: Right. Let us pick one and then see why that would be beneficial for us.

C: Let us start with Swiggy. Zomato has a premium membership while Swiggy did not which made it a good partner.

I: That's fine we can close the case here. That will be all from my side.

• Q1. Estimate the yearly revenue of Cafeteria & Co.
  View Answers (2)

• Q1. Guesstimate the sale of air purifiers in India.
  View Answers (2)

Let us quickly do a short case as we are short on time. ICICI bank has 1000 customers who use their commercial credit cards. These cards are of 2 types -

1) Purchase cards,
2) Travel & expense cards.

I want you to give me factors to look into by which we can identify which customers (companies) spend less using our cards and which have the potential for more.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate]

C: We can look into the cash flow and income statements of all 1000 companies and then compare them.

I: That's exactly right. But it is difficult to get this data as all companies might not be listed. Tell me how we can go ahead with the internal data itself.

C: I just wanted to clarify that the internal data referred to spending by different companies or not.

I: Yeah, that is right. We also can get a proxy of revenue for our clients.

C: Then what we can do is take out the ratio of revenue to expenditure for all our clients and further the percentage of their expenses that are made through our cards. We can then benchmark our clients against some high spending companies within our portfolio.

I: That's great Abhishek. That is the right way to go about it. So now ICICI has identified 200 such clients which have the potential to increase their spends. Tell me how we can come up with a strategy to target them.

C: We can further divide the expenses into various heads and then see which company is spending less where and come up with an appropriate pitch for that client.

• Q1. Introduce yourself.
  Add Answer

Guesstimate the number of table tennis balls you can fit into an airplane.
I started with estimated the volume of one table tennis ball and then estimated the volume of a plane.

(Considered the plane to be made of a cylinder and two conical structures at the two ends; I simplified the streamlined body).

Then I estimated the luggage space using the estimate of number of passengers and their 15kg
luggage allocation.

I further added a threshold for the extra luggage that is allowed after payment. I also accounted for engines, wings, seats, upper cabin luggage, washroom etc.

Your client is a mall chain owner in Singapore. They have been facing a decline in profits lately. You have been asked to identify the problem and recommend solutions.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate] 

C: I would like to know a little bit more about the client. How many malls do they own? Are these typical malls like we have Phoenix Malls in India?

I: Yes, similar to Phoenix malls in India. They have 3 malls in Singapore.

C: Is the problem with all the three malls or any one in specific? If all, is the competition also facing a similar issue?

I: Just one mall and the competition are not facing the issue.

C: Okay. Digging deeper into the profitability issue, is it because of the declining revenues or increasing costs or a combination of both?

I: It's a combination. I would like you to explore revenues first.

C: Okay. Broadly I can divide the revenue streams for the mall into rent and commissions from shops, advertisements inside and outside the mall and parking fees.

I: Let's look at commissions.

C: Okay. The shops can further be divided into premium and normal. For each there will be food, apparels, shoes, accessories, and shops like lifestyle, pantaloons in India where you find everything (except for food).

I: Correct. Let's look at these shops where you can find everything. This is where our commissions have been declining. Can you suggest any solutions?

C: Sure. Customers visit these shops because they can find all the brands at one location though the collection is limited for each brand. They also get discounts in these shops.

The staff can be better trained at handling the customers and identifying what they are looking for exactly.

The mannequins should be carefully displayed as they play a crucial role in converting a sale for a window shopper. (This is coming from personal experience)

• Q1. What do you know about MasterCard?
  View Answers (1)
• Q2. Why do you want to join MasterCard?
  View Answers (1)
• Q3. Where you do you see yourself 5 years down the line?
  Add Answer
• Q4. How do you think you did in the case and guesstimate round?
  Add Answer
• Q5. Tell us about your Scuba diving experience? (It was mentioned in the CV)
  Add Answer

• Q1. Tell me something about yourself.
  Add Answer
• Q2. Why consulting after audit?
  Add Answer
• Q3. What do you know about Mastercard Advisory services?
  View Answers (1)
• Q4. Why do you think you are good fit for Consulting?
  Add Answer
• Q5. Which other shortlists do you have?
  Add Answer
• Q6. A brief discussion about one of my projects related to GTM.
  Add Answer

Calculate the number of table tennis balls that can be put inside an Indigo airplane.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate]

C: The number of balls that can be put inside a plane would be the =volume of the plane-30% (for the seats, equipment which are a part of the airplane)/ volume of the one TT ball.

I: Let us move forward with the approach only.

C: We can consider the middle portion of the plane to be a cylinder and the dimensions can be calculated assuming the number of rows to be 30. Assuming every row has distance of 1m distance between them which makes a 30m length adding another 5m for the cockpit area, we get a total length of 35m. An average person is of the height 2m. Hence the volume=3.14*2*2*35=400m^3.

An average table tennis ball is of a radius 2.5-3cm. The volume of one ball=4/3*3.14*3*3*3=113.04cm^3 which we convert back to my^3.

Your client is a card issuer. How can they increase their revenues?
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate]

C: For the sake of the case can I assume the operations of the client to be like maybe say ICICI bank?

I: That's correct. But's lets only focus on increasing the profitability for the card’s revenue segment.

C: Alright! Profitability can be measured in terms of Revenues and Costs. According to my knowledge of the industry, revenue of the client would mostly be from the Gross Dollar value charged from customers, transaction or interchange fee, interest charged. And the costs are the costs of issuing, acquisition cost of the client, merchant fee paid.

Please let me know if I am missing out on anything as I am not fully aware about the payments industry.

I: That's understandable. We can move forward with these heads. How can we increase the profitability from the interest revenue?

C: Interest revenue are majorly charged when a consumer makes a purchase on the credit card. We can look into the EMI section as that is major source of this kind of an income. We can increase the EMI facilities in different products.

• Q1. Tell me something about yourself.
  Add Answer
• Q2. Why consulting? Why do you think you will be good at consulting?
  Add Answer
• Q3. Explain your contribution to the work done by you in your internships?
  View Answers (1)

Jio-Mart is looking forward to launch a payments card. What would be its target market/customer? What scheme do you suggest-cashbacks or points?
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate]

C: Could you tell me more about the features of the payment card. Is it like a debit/credit card or does it work on points and cashbacks?

I: You can consider it to be similar to the Amazon pay card that is in tie up with ICICI Bank.

C: I would like to divide the market into urban and rural. I will further divide rural areas into places with and without internet penetration. Can I proceed with this approach?

I: Yes, you can go ahead.

C: Since, Jio has a mass appeal image the target customers could be very large, we can target the existing Jio customers which provide higher ARPU. To calculate the final market size, we will need to consider the behavioral and demographic elements of the target population.

I: Very well, do you think launching the card is feasible?

C: (I did a PESTEL and Porter analysis to ensure that launching the card is feasible.) I recommend you should go ahead with cashbacks in the short term to attract the customers away from other competitors like Amazon. But since cashbacks are really expensive, in the longer term, we can shift to a points system.

(I also did a customer and competitor analysis. The interviewer asked me a few follow up questions post that, majorly to explain the answer in more detail.)

• Q1. Guesstimate the number of characters on your CV.
  View Answers (1)
• Q2. I am a bank and I send reward points for redemption to my customers. The site is 5-year-old, and we are planning to revamp it now. Lately, we have noticed that ...read more
  View Answers (1)

• Q1. Introduce yourself.
  Add Answer
• Q2. How has been your experience in MasterCard so far?
  Add Answer

Your client is a 2-wheeler tire manufacturer seeing decline in sales for the past 4 quarters.

They have asked for your help.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate] 

Started off with CPCC and understood that the decline was in South Indian cities. Client has a B2B business model wherein they’d sell to auto OEMs and also has a B2C arm as well selling to retail market.

The sales were primarily offline sales and decline was witnessed across all products. Client is one of the top 4 players pan-India and is losing customers to all competitors, no one specific (asked this to eliminate the possibility of the competitor doing something differently and focus only on internal issues).

C: Please allow me a few moments to structure my thoughts. A decline in revenues can be either because of tweaking our prices, the product mix or the overall number of units sold.

I: Yes, focus on the overall number of units sold.

C: Units sold could have gone down because either we are unable to manufacture enough and thus it’s a supply side issue or there isn’t sufficient distributor push or customer pull.

I: We have sufficient supply. Let’s start off with what the issue could be with respect to distributor push and then customer pull.

C: Before I dive deep into the distributor side issue, do we have stand-alone distributor, or the distributor sells our competitors’ products as well.

I: Yes, they do sell the competitor’s products as well.

C: Okay then issue can be either because there’s a change in the number of distributors, location of distributors or the distributor relationship.

I: What do you mean by distributor relationship?

C: Primarily the incentive structure, our distributor could be preferring the competitor because we have changed our terms, or the competitor has changed their terms.

I: That’s right, the competitors are providing a higher cut and thus our distributors are pushing their products. Now lets’ move on the customer pull.

I went the customer journey route splitting to Need, Awareness, Affordability, Awareness and Experience (per-purchase, during as well as post-purchase). She asked me to dive deep into awareness, so I split it to Personal Selling, Advertising, Sales Promotion and Public Relations.

Before we could discuss more on the customer side issue, she asked me to summarize the
case and we were done.

Guesstimate the annual revenue of your favorite restaurant in your city.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate] 

Clarified if the focus is only on offline or online delivery sales as well. He asked me to stick to dining sales.

Made the below assumptions:

Working hours: 12
Service time: 1 hour

Split the day into peak and non-peak hours and split the week into weekdays and weekends to give varied occupancy rate.

Average order value per table = Rs. 1000
Average order per person = Rs. 300
40-seater restaurant

Got a weekly sales number and multiplied by 52 to arrive at yearly sales (he tried to check my attentiveness by saying I will be multiplying the sales number with 365 days, right?) After all the calculations, the yearly revenue came out to be Rs. 3 Cr/annum.

He then asked me to summarize the case as I would to the restaurant owner using a crisp structure.

Client is a credit card issuer (think ICICI Bank) who has launched a product that gives 4% discount on online spend. The profitability is going down. They have asked for your help to increase profitability.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate] 

Asked clarifying questions whether this was as per-COVID or post-COVID issue. The issue spanned both timelines.

Target audience was millennials, digitally savvy with inclination to spend online. 1% discount on offline sales but the usage was almost exclusively online by customers.

C: To increase the profitability we can try to reduce our costs or increase our sales.

I: Focus on revenues.

C: Revenues can be split into fixed revenue (such as annual fees) and transaction-based revenue from merchant, late fees, etc.

We discussed extensively on above talking about increasing the APR, reducing the discount we give, reduce period of default, increase revolving income, increase size of transaction.

• Q1. Tell me about yourself in under 1 min.
  View Answers (1)
• Q2. What kind of legacy you would like to leave and to which fictional/historical character, the legacy resembles?
  Add Answer
• Q3. Elaborate on a project you did while working with Praxis. Brief discussion on hobbies.
  Add Answer

A rental furniture store is experiencing loss in market share. Help the client on the steps ahead.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate]

C: Where does the store operate? What product variants it sells (high ticket items/small etc.).

I: Delhi, sells both high- and low-ticket items.

C: What kind of business model the firm has? - rental charge, duration, procurement from etc.

I: 3 possibilities - Either customer pays monthly charge as per use, customer pays monthly charge for 2-3 months and then buys the furniture at lumpsum amount, customer pays monthly charge for a year or so and is handed over possession of furniture.

C: What is current market share, How much decline in market share? Is the decline in any SKU? who are competitors?

I: Market leader currently with 40% share, fragmented market with new entrants. Decline is nonspecific.

C: Structure- Market share of this firm will be a function of #customers* avg spend per customer (further divided into - frequency of purchase* avg ticket size per item). So, either one of these have been affected or a combination that led to fall in market share. I started elaborating reasons for all 4 buckets. # customer falling due to customers switching to competitors. This can be because of better customer discounts, better user interface for purchasing, awareness should not be an issue as already market leader, better financing facilities like EMIs etc.

I: Firm Y is giving higher discounts and is also providing attractive EMI options for high ticket items. Additionally, they are pushing the lumpsum model rather than other 2. Can you tell why would they do it?

C: Reason 1- Lower working capital for procuring new furniture for sale,
Reason 2- Customers like to rent brand new furniture and by pushing selling of the same, they can keep fresh stock for rental customers and increase value proposition.

I: What recommendations you would like to give?

C: The firm has basically 2 types of customers - Paying Guests, usually millennials staying in Delhi for work / university - expect vibrant and sleek furniture. Conservative customers who like to try high ticket furniture first and then buy if it suits their ambience, such items are also lower priced than fresh product.

C: After doing cost benefit analysis, we can provide discounts like competitors and also provide new services like home interior services for vibrant houses as target audience is millennials.

A low-cost airline player has xx revenues. Its non-fuel costs were 2x its fuel costs. PAT margin was y%. The fuel costs have recently doubled. What is new profitability. What should they do to maintain initial PAT margins?
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate]

C: Calculated new PAT margin by finding initial costs, then doubling fuel costs. Clearly stated the assumption that revenues have remain unchanged, i.e., price of ticket and neither #customers have changed to calculate new PAT margin. In order to maintain initial PAT margins, either revenues should increase, or costs should go down. Should I consider both possibilities?

I: Focus on increasing revenues only.

C: I would like to calculate by how much % we need to increase revenues considering costs cannot increase to maintain same PAT margin. Revenue = #customers * avg ticket size of a flight * avg frequency of travel #customers: Increase occupancy rates in non-peak times (when its usually 30-40%) by reducing prices a bit and better marketing. Also, newer routes (via cities) can be done to cater to newer locations for higher occupancy rates.

I: We do not want to incur any costs on marketing, routes are already at optimal and we can consider the occupancy point. Let us say 3% revenues increase due to it. (we needed ~14% increase)

C: For increasing avg ticket size: We can provide additional meals or newer supplementary services such as OTT apps streaming etc.

I: No, we want to maintain our image as low-cost carrier only.

C: The average frequency of travel can increase by more competitive pricing if possible. New routes to cater to newer customers is not an option as already established.

I: What recommendations you will give to this firm? Given we are 2nd in market currently and 1 out of only 2 players who are profitable in the industry.

C: Not much can be done during this time to increase PAT margins. Our advantage lies in sheer profitability which the firm is still making as high fuel costs will affect other players too, and more severely, given they are already loss making. This opens new doors to possible mergers in future and increase diversification of airlines leading to higher revenues and higher future PAT margins.

• Q1. Tell me something about yourself.
  Add Answer

Guesstimate the footfall of tourists in U.P. in a year. What can be done to increase the number?
I narrowed down the guesstimate by asking scoping questions.

I asked whether I had to calculate the number for Indian tourists or international (as I was required to give recommendations as well).

Further, I asked which sites have to be considered.

They asked me to consider both national and international tourists. I asked them if I could start from estimating Taj Mahal's footfall then adjust numbers for different sites.

I took 52 weeks in a year, bifurcated it into weekday and weekend.

Then, I took the capacity approach by considering area of Taj Mahal and its operation timings.

Further, I suggested 4-5 famous places and adjusted the number.

Under suggestions I highlighted easy visa availability, better connectivity, improvement in transport facilities, infrastructure and women safety.

A bank wants to expand its credit card facility to small and medium enterprises in India.

Calculate potential market size. Give reasons which could stop SMEs from adopting credit cards.
I tried different approaches, but I could not come to the number. In end he asked me to summarize and answer the second half of the case. I stated all sort of socio-economic issues and myths which could lead to low adoption of credit facility.

Calculate the income given to housemaids in India in a month.
I took the household approach and considered tier-1, tier-2 and tier-3 cities. I incorporated the income of households and number of maids required. For each tier, I used my personal experience of living at different places (which seemed to work in my favor).

• Q1. Tell me something about yourself.
  Add Answer

An airline company came to master card to launch a co-branded card in India. The airlines have seen revenues pick up again in the covid year and we need to formulate a GTM Strategy for the same.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate] 

I: Let us formulate a GTM Strategy.

C: (Started with clarifying the problem statement & then moved to asking preliminary questions)

I: (Interviewer gave more context) As travel picked post COVID, ticket prized have gone up and people have resumed traveling, in fact they are keen.

C: Okay. Is our client a low-cost carrier? Also, asked a brand image related question.

I: Yes, client is a low-cost carrier, with a young vibe.

C: (Kept it conversational, took a minute, the interviewer was supportive & sweet) Before we deep dive into the GTM strategy, I would like to understand a few things:

1. Current scenario/Gap

2. Competitor

3. Who can we target?

Does that sound fair?

Mentioned that the customer base should mainly consist of GenY (Business class & travelers of the right age who use air travel often so millennials).

I: Agreed.

C: Asked questions related to current scenarios, like: what loyalty programs, website or app that is operational, how we give discounts?

I: Yes, for the customers. Clients currently don’t have a loyalty program in place, they work through already existing aggregators to give discounts. And they don’t have an app or website (Interviewer liked one of these questions)

C: What is our competition doing? Do they offer loyalty programs? What do we know about what competition is doing differently? (The latter most question can be framed in many ways)

I: They do offer loyalty programs and hence we have been told they have higher retention. Now, Anushruti, I want you to think on “How can they go to market?”, assume we have the product or card ready we don’t need to design the specifics of the product. Take a minute if you like.

C: (Took a minute) I went back saying I would broadly divide the decisions in two parts:

1. Identifying the TAM (STP)

2. Marketing (Awareness & demand gen) and walked her through my thought process briefly.

I: (She gave direction to the conversation, I was confident so the conversation wasn’t dropping low at any point neither was she being difficult, so relax and stay at it: focus on building the conversation)

Wanted me to think on GTM more, how will I plan?

C: Took a minute before responding and went back with the What/When/How/Who structure (it was a two-level structure). Walked her through it and checked with her before I walked her through all my ideas.

(It was conversational, she was satisfied and asked another question)

I: Now, assess if it is feasible for Mastercard to launch such a card, what parameters to consider seeing its validity.

C: In our target demographic, check for patterns based on the data Mastercard has:

i) Spend using credit v/s debit (especially in this industry)

ii) Check with airlines to see what data they have on bookings made in the region (different channels, traffic)

iii) Cobranded card performance, etc. (elaborated on these lines)

Metro stations have huge real estate to offer for brands to market themselves and recently they had started capitalizing on the same by offering the space outside of metro stations as well as inside, capturing larger audience on the road and inside the metros. Now imagine you are an edible oil company, say Saffola and estimate how much you should pay for advertising on this large scale at Gurugram metro station (the last metro station)
I had questions but even before I started thinking about how to solve it, I repeated the guesstimate and my understanding of it.

In the process, we discussed how the impact for Saffola will be based on the footfall and the brand visibility created which the interviewer called ‘pay per eyeball’ (like pay per click): so, we basically want to estimate the number of eyeballs this investment can fetch Saffola.

(Guesstimate was fairly simple from here but the application was new with some slight nuances added to it).

Now I started thinking about how to solve it.

Approach: (Clarified some preliminary questions to understand typical customer base and who are we targeting so that I can create target segments). I had established that there can be three types of customers we would have:

1. Homemakers

2. Gen Y: Young professionals (who want to have home-cooked meal, develop healthy habits)

3. Chefs/Tiffin-services/maids: basically, others who influence the decision of buying edible oil at homes

Now thinking about who all from our above segments maybe using the metro station or get exposed to the ads, the 2nd type took the highest priority. Solved the guesstimate using four main levels (starting from taking Delhi’s entire population):

1. Age: 20-45 which was 35% of the population (shared the breakup and how I came to 35%)

2. Income level: 70% of the population is either mid or low middle income which I wanted to consider

3. Working in Gurugram: Assuming 3 main work-centers in Delhi i.e., Noida, Gurugram and central or rest of Delhi: took 1/3rd of the population from 2

4. Gender: Split them between men and women + assumed half the men are now actively engaged in cooking or being the direct audience, calculated a number.

Here the customer type 1 & 2 were minority, so we didn’t consider incorporating them.

Though, the interviewer did ask what is missing here?

The people who never used the metros but saw the add on the road crossing the metro is a segment we left out but again a small segment and can be estimated using a logical %. I decided not to (80-20). Now instead of taking a number for how much to pay per eyeball to get a final estimate the interviewer closed the case. I checked to calculate but it wasn’t required.