Mike Kresse is Executive Vice President of Commercial and New Payment Flows at Mastercard, North America. In this role, he leads the go-to-market strategy for a diverse set of commercial products and services, spanning large corporate, middle market, SMB, healthcare, and money transfer solutions.
Mike oversees a cross-functional team that’s helping to scale innovation, accelerate market expansion, and drive revenue across customer segments. His leadership centers on unlocking growth through collaboration, customer-centricity, and the seamless commercialization of products that make money movement faster, smarter, and more inclusive.
With more than 25 years of experience in commercial payments, B2B commerce, fintech, and financial services, Mike brings a strategic mindset and deep operational expertise to every challenge.
Prior to joining Mastercard, he spent eight years at FIS, where he led P&Ls across key platforms including accounts payable and receivable, bill pay, card processing, embedded finance, and global money movement. Throughout his career, Mike has delivered results by aligning product and sales teams around customer value and future-ready innovation—fueling long-term business growth and digital transformation.
Mike is known for his optimistic, energetic leadership style and his ability to connect across teams and industries. He is passionate about the evolving role of finance and payments in powering opportunity—whether it’s helping a CFO better manage working capital, enabling small businesses to build credit, or reducing friction in cross-border payments.
Outside of work, he’s an advocate for mentorship, inclusion, and continuous learning.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Connect with Mike on LinkedIn.
This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.
TRANSCRIPT
Intro: Broadcasting live from Fintech South 2025 at the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio. Now. Here’s your host.
Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here broadcasting live from Fintech South 2025. So excited to be talking to my guest, Mike Kresse with Mastercard. So Mike, tell us a little bit about why Mastercard decided to sponsor and partner with Fintech South Fintech.
Mike Kresse: There’s just a tremendous amount of innovation that’s happening in fintech right now. And ultimately events like Fintech South. The types of investments that tag is making. Create a forum and an opportunity for us to gather together and do an idea exchange. Financial technology isn’t about market dominance. It’s about collaboration. It’s about looking at all the players that are in the ecosystem. Everyone is bringing good ideas to the table, and it’s about figuring out how can we enable success for all the constituents and stakeholders, whether those are consumers and small businesses that are now being included in the financial ecosystem? Through financial technology players, whether that’s large corporates that are looking for innovation and efficiencies, there’s just a tremendous amount of opportunity for financial institutions. So we’re here because it’s great. It’s an exchange of ideas. It’s collaboration, it’s ideation, and it’s really where the latest ideas are talked about.
Lee Kantor: So when you come here with your folks from Mastercard here in Atlanta, how do you recommend they take advantage of an event like Fintech South and the organization tag?
Mike Kresse: Yeah, I think there’s a there’s a few vectors that you look at. The first is of course education. There’s is opportunities here to learn about the latest breakthroughs on artificial intelligence, the latest happenings with crypto and stablecoins a big topic right now. And so I think first and foremost, there’s an opportunity for education. But the fast follow on that is building relationships. And of course, the the type of business development and networking that you expect would happen at an event like this. We encourage our team to come in very open minded, to not only be looking for the folks that we’re thinking we want to talk to and partner with, but to be available to be approached by organizations that we may not know that are actually out there in the ecosystem or doing something phenomenally interesting. So it’s come in, be ready to learn, be ready to build relationships and be open to the possibility of of meeting the the next big company that is going to do incredible things.
Lee Kantor: So Mastercard is so ubiquitous. Um, it’s probably in everybody’s wallet here. How do you stay relevant and current with all the advent of what’s happening in fintech digitally.
Mike Kresse: I really love that question. Ultimately, for us, it’s about keeping our attention focused on the customer. Is that customer a consumer cardholder? Is it a small business? Is it a large corporate? Is it someone that’s trying to send money home? Is it a financial institution? Is it the government and what are their needs? What are the needs that they actually have? What are problems that are getting in their way from growing, from being efficient, from having secure payment transactions so that fraud is not creeping into the mix. If we keep our eye on solving for the needs that are in the market, that’s how we stay relevant. Because if everything comes from need, everything comes from solving for the ecosystem as a whole, then we’ll know that we’re innovating in the right way.
Lee Kantor: So, um, how do your people communicate with each of those constituents? Like like what is how do they stay, you know, up to date with what’s happening and what those needs are, because it seems like they’re changing so rapidly.
Mike Kresse: Yeah. The the good news about a company like Mastercard is we’re very, very focused on the various end constituents that are benefiting via inclusion via, again, better security, via faster payments that are benefiting from the ecosystem. So not only do we spend a lot of time in consumer forums and doing small business and small town takeovers for small businesses and for consumers, but we spend a lot of time at conferences like Fintech South, where we can actually get the the real coalface information about what is those, what are those needs and what actually is taking place. So I’d love to give you some what seems like revelatory answer, but at the end of the day, it’s just about spending time with people with an open mind and with an open heart to hear what it is that they’re dealing with, and then to jointly solution and jointly solve around that.
Lee Kantor: Now, the the part that I’m struggling with is and maybe you’re not struggling with it is that Mastercard everyone’s heard of but have has everyone had a conversation with somebody from Mastercard, or do they have conversations with other people you know, on your behalf?
Mike Kresse: Yeah. So the question that you’re asking really gets back to what’s our our go to market model and what’s the what’s the way in which we impact our end constituents. You could you could say, well, no, no one talks to Mastercard. They just talk to the bank who’s issued the Mastercard card, like in just the plainest of contexts. Right. But the reality is our employees, um, are our trust in our brand and the experience that a consumer is able to have at the point of sale or at the time that they’re booking a trip that ends up getting facilitated because of Mastercard’s network, they actually are touching Mastercard, and they’re interacting with Mastercard in that context. And we’re able to look at that experience. We’re able to see what it is that we were able to bring to that consumer, to that small business and say to ourselves, how can we make that more elegant? How can we make that safer, faster, more efficient? So really, I mean, obviously we all talk to people all throughout our day in and day out. We have over 35,000 employees, but we’re touching people in all walks of life every day, just by the technology that’s in their hands that they’re capable of using.
Lee Kantor: And you’ve been able to build a brand that does, um, kind of garner that much trust in the ecosystem that allows people to feel comfortable and safe using, uh, Mastercard. So that kudos to you for doing that, because a lot of these newer, uh, digital, uh, choices haven’t, you know, done that from a branding standpoint and developed that level of trust with their end user? So, I mean, that has to be a huge advantage in the marketplace moving forward as even as the digital landscape evolves, it it.
Mike Kresse: It’s an advantage, but it’s also an opportunity. So what I’m going to be talking about on stage later today is we’re here as a scale player for all of the innovators that are here at Fintech South to leverage, to bring their unique user experience, their unique use case to fruition and to market. And by partnering with Mastercard and going through the process of onboarding, they then become a trusted provider of services to their clients. So we don’t see it as a, hey, we’ve built this trusted brand, so that’s that’s a moat and people can’t touch that. It’s very different than that. We’ve built this trusted brand so that it can be leveraged, and our capabilities can be leveraged to bring all sorts of new use cases, disruption and experiences out to the world.
Lee Kantor: So how do you partner with kind of that emerging, Innovative new brand.
Mike Kresse: There’s a number of ways that we do it. I mean, we have, um, our, uh, our fintech accelerator investments where people can get on our start path to really help start plugging into what Mastercard offers. Uh, we offer a lot of small business advisory services and forums where folks can engage. Our platforms are built with developer portals and ecosystems, so people can sandbox and play with Mastercard capabilities and how they would embed them into their overall ecosystem. We have dedicated account teams that are at events like this, looking and being being open to those companies, approaching Mastercard, looking for help or looking for how we can assist. And then we’re messaging out very actively, very actively through multiple channels in the market on what it is that we can help do for these customers. So it really is I got to tell you guys, like one of the things I love about fintech because I happen to love people is it’s not, um, it’s not a competition from the standpoint of only certain people can play. It’s a giant collaboration, and the term cooperation is fintech. We compete on some things, we cooperate on other things, and it’s a very, very healthy ecosystem that continues to drive innovation at pace.
Lee Kantor: So how do you find the Atlanta, um, technology and fintech community as compared to maybe other places around the country or the world that you work with?
Mike Kresse: So I did my entire career in Silicon Valley until about five years ago when I relocated out, and I’ve been on the East Coast now for about those five years. I was southeast for five years and in the northeast now for for eight months. So I’ve traveled around the country, I’ve traveled around the world. It lanta has just this unique dynamic of having major payment companies headquartered here, with very capable universities feeding into those employers and incredible organizations like Tag and others that are directly addressing financial technology innovation and creating forums for collaboration that doesn’t exist everywhere. Does it exist in San Francisco? You have some of it as it exists in New York. Yes, of course you have some of it. But Atlanta has this uniqueness of having major players headquartered here and having been the switching city for for decades, right, of where so many transactions come in and are switched. So I think that Atlanta just creates a very great environment for ideation, for collaboration, and transparently as people move from one company to the other and or start and found their own companies, it just creates a positive flywheel effect of accelerating innovation overall. And that for me personally, is really exciting. And it’s a differentiated aspect of Atlanta.
Lee Kantor: How do you see the talent pipeline that comes out of here? You mentioned universities, but there’s also fintech academies. There’s some other things that are happening here. Um, is this a healthy kind of thriving? Um, pipeline that we have here, or is this something that we’re going to have to be bringing in people from other places in order to really, um, you know, generate the talent that’s necessary to keep this a thriving fintech community.
Mike Kresse: So that’s a I get to answer the fun. Yes and yes answer. So what I would tell you is it’s a very thriving community. The point I was just making previously is that people move from company to company here, and they go from large, and then they try it as small, and they’re bringing those experiences in, and then they go back out to a large where they’ve learned to be really nimble and innovative at a small. All that back and forth between the companies, even just based here in Atlanta, are great. But I would, of course, always encourage any local economy, any local ecosystem to be importing talent as well and exporting talent, right, because that’s what creates a healthy ecosystem. So I think this is a phenomenal place. You’ve got the fintech academies, you’ve got I think Georgia was one of the first places that had actual financial technology sales as a major at one of the universities. Right. So there’s there’s a lot of innovation that’s happened here from a curriculum standpoint. And then of course, all the experience from the various employers that are here, but very vibrant market, very strong talent, uh, very much a place where having a strong footprint like we do as Mastercard is important.
Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of? How could our listeners help you?
Mike Kresse: I think first is, and I don’t know that we need more of it. I think what we need less of is, uh, thinking about, uh, Mastercard as it’s just a Cartoon Network and they’re not going to want to talk to us. I think when you look at a lot of the big players that are out there, and you could call us a big scaled player, there might be a hesitancy to want to see, like what it is that we could do for that small company that’s just getting started or for that founder. We want to help. We want to ideate, we want to really engage. So what we could do more of is really making Mastercard accessible to every one of the folks that are here, every one of the folks that are in the Atlanta market or are associated with Tag and letting them know, hey, come engage with Mastercard because we can help you get to market within a unique differentiation that only you can bring.
Lee Kantor: So the more fintech startups that called you, the happier you’d be.
Mike Kresse: 1,000%.
Lee Kantor: Good stuff. So if somebody wants to connect with you and, you know, get on your calendar or explain what they got going on, what is the website, what’s the best way to connect?
Mike Kresse: I mean, obviously you can go through WW, Mastercard, com, you can of course reach out to me at Mike, which is Cressey, my last name at Mastercard. And gents, I really appreciate you having me on the show. This has just been a great discussion and it’s really, really great to be here with you.
Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time at Fintech South 2025.
