Associate Consultant Intern, 2026 – Lisbon, Portugal

Our Purpose

Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we’re helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.

Title and Summary

Associate Consultant Intern, 2026 – Lisbon, Portugal

Associate Consultant Intern, 2026 - Lisbon, Portugal

At Mastercard, our Advisors & Consulting Services (ACS) group helps clients drive impact through data-driven insights, hands-on implementation, and a collaborative, tech-enabled culture. We invest in talent through global engagements, continuous learning, and programs like the Global Ambassadors Program, while fostering purpose through volunteerism, pro-bono work, and innovation that benefits both clients and communities.


Make an Impact as an Associate Consultant Intern

As an Associate Consultant Intern, you will collaborate within small teams to help some of the world's biggest brands answer and implement solutions for their most challenging strategic questions. You will immediately create meaningful contributions through taking ownership of deliverables and building external relationships with clients. Focusing on technology and data, you will gain broad exposure to a range of industries, including financial services, retail, restaurants, hospitality and more.


As an Associate Consultant Intern, you will:

• Participate in volunteer and team building experiences

• Gain exposure to our leadership team through networking sessions and speaker series
• Begin to build relationships with clients to understand their business needs, seek strategic solutions and guide impactful decisions
• Grow by receiving hands-on mentorship from an experienced management team.
• Have an opportunity for meaningful contributions
• Collaborate with colleagues across different areas of the organization and gain exposure to business development, account management, and product management

We are looking for passionate and talented professionals, who share our vision for helping our customers with their most urgent business need. We are recruiting for four career tracks that make up our team. Track placement will indicate the types of projects where you will spend most of your time; however, we encourage and enable working across tracks to allow team members to acquire diverse skills and experiences.


Business Experimentation

Leverage Mastercard's industry-leading predictive analytics platform, Test & Learn®, and SQL to run data-backed business experiments for our clients. Consultants focus on data science-based solutions to provide insights on various business initiatives, including product launches, marketing campaigns, customer loyalty, and pricing across various industries that touch many Fortune 500 companies. Partner directly with clients to share findings and help determine which ideas are effective, as well as where, when, and how to implement them.

Sampling of questions we help our customers answer:

Where should a retailer open new stores to maximize profitability and minimize the cannibalization of nearby omnichannel sales?

What bonus should be provided to someone opening a credit card account to entice them to use the card regularly?

Strategy & Transformation

Guide clients through strategic, tactical, operational, and transformational challenges to enhance performance and operations. Our engagements cover diverse areas, including product development, marketing, customer loyalty, and innovation. Working with clients from various industries, many S&T engagements directly interface with numerous Fortune 500 companies. This role aligns with the practices of traditional management consulting firms.

Sampling of questions we help our customers answer:

How can a global financial services institution be successful at entering a hyper competitive new market?

How can a customer improve its operating model to better achieve operational, financial and strategic goals?

Performance Analytics

Use quantitative and qualitative skills and enterprise applications (e.g., Business Intelligence Platforms, SQL, Python, and more) to drive data-led consulting solutions for customers. Weave together vast amounts Mastercard, client & 3rd party data assets to investigate trends, build propensity models, develop data visualizations, and synthesize millions of data point