How Mastercard Blends Human-Led Research and AI to Close the Consumer Say-Do Gap with Discuss

“We’re a small but mighty team. What we really want to do is focus on delivering the insights, not the busy work. And that’s where Discuss and its AI agents have been instrumental in helping us move faster and deliver, frankly, better products.”

– Maria Rydzewski, Principal at Mastercard Data & Services

From the IIEX Europe presentation, What Consumers Do vs. What They Say: Smarter Research in the Age of AI

Watch the full session here.

About Mastercard

As a global technology company in the finance industry, Mastercard’s mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible. As part of its broader strategy, Mastercard places a strong emphasis on deeply understanding its consumers to help its clients across financial services, retail, and healthcare act with confidence.

At the heart of this effort is the Mastercard Research Center, which delivers end-to-end market intelligence, ranging from ready-made industry insights to fully bespoke studies—bringing together research, analytics, and consulting. “We combine our transactional data with consumer research, with our deep expertise in the payments industry, to bring a more holistic offering to our clients,” said Maria Rydzewski.

Challenge

Mastercard wanted to get closer to the people they serve to help their clients close the gap of what consumers say they will do and what they actually do. But getting real-time, in-depth consumer feedback came with challenges: 

• Delivering in-depth insights quickly and affordably has historically been quite difficult.
  Both internal teams and external clients now expect faster answers. Research needs to keep pace with culture, without breaking the budget. But traditional methods weren’t designed for this kind of speed or scale.

• The gap between what people say and what they do often gets in the way of key decisions.
  One of the biggest hurdles in consumer research is the “say-do” gap. When it comes to financial behavior, Mastercard has seen a familiar pattern, consumers describing their ideal selves rather than their actual habits. Everyone claims to spend within their means, but the reality tells a different story. The team needed a way to go beyond surface-level responses to uncover, in real-time, what truly drives consumer decisions.

• Outsourcing research often means a lack of true consumer connection and insights ownership.
  Mastercard was ready to take ownership of the full research process and get closer to their audiences than ever before. They wanted to move away from relying solely on external vendors and bring more of the work in-house without sacrificing the quality of customer feedback. To do that effectively, they needed a platform that gave them full visibility and control over every stage of the journey.
  
  At the same time, they needed a way to bring together what people do with why they do it, to paint a richer, more complete picture of the customer. And with teams distributed globally, Mastercard also needed a centralized platform to support collaboration, knowledge sharing, and consistency across regions.

Mastercard needed a solution that enabled their team to connect directly with bigger, global audiences, to have ownership of the in-depth feedback and the research process, and to have it all in one global, self-service research platform.

Solution

To tackle these challenges, Mastercard partnered with Discuss for a single, scalable solution that empowered its teams to move faster, make smarter decisions, and scale insights globally. 

One global self-service research hub 

Discuss offers a globally accessible hub that brings all of Mastercard’s consumer connections under one roof—human-led interviews, self-paced research activities, and past research (which can be uploaded to the platform), to AI agents that support the entire research lifecycle to video editing and analysis tools. This centralized and searchable research repository makes it easier for Mastercard’s global teams to access insights on-demand, easily bringing consumer voices into their decisions.

In a heavily regulated field like the financial industry, compliance is non-negotiable. Discuss’ end-to-end platform helps Mastercard automate key security and compliance steps all within one tool. Using AI-led questions and tech checks, Mastercard is able to find the right respondents quicker while ensuring compliance with built-in consent forms and screeners.

“Having those built in compliance checks has been really helpful in freeing up my time, not walking through every single law in different states. It’s really nice having a partner that can just take care of that and all I have to do is make sure that I deliver the best product that I can.”

– Maria Rydzewski, Principal at Mastercard Data & Services

​​AI-led and human-led interview capabilities in one platform

For Mastercard, Discuss brings together the speed and scale of AI-led interviews with the empathy and depth of human-led conversations. Discuss’ all-in-one solution gives Mastercard flexibility to tailor their approach based on their unique business need—ensuring every team, no matter the topic or target audience, can get closer to the “why” behind the “what.”

“Discuss’ AI moderation is just another great tool in our toolkit. When we’re talking about something more sensitive like people paying bills or financial stress, traditional human-led research is probably still going to be a better approach. But if it’s message testing or product feedback, AI is great for scale, speed, and efficiency.”

– Maria Rydzewski, Principal at Mastercard Data & Services

Actionable insights in an instant with the power of AI agents.

With Discuss’ AI agents, Mastercard is dramatically accelerating their time to insights. Rather than teams spending hours sifting through hours of recordings, transcripts, and notes, Discuss’ Insights Agent does the heavy lifting to analyze research. Whether human-led interviews, self-paced feedback activities, or uploaded research, the AI surfaces themes, quotes, and links findings to research goals in minutes.

Discuss’ Agents also breaks down language barriers for Mastercard’s global empathy projects – summarizing interviews across multiple languages and countries.

Unlimited research model that incentivizes more consumer connections.

Discuss’ unique approach gives Mastercard unlimited access to qualitative research — allowing teams to engage regularly with their target audiences while maintaining cost efficiency. This unlimited model also offers Mastercard the essential services and support they need for all of their research projects including live tech support on every session, recruiting respondents, project management, and more.

Results

In just three months with Discuss, Mastercard has already seen an impact on how their clients are gaining faster, deeper understanding of their audiences around the globe:

• 250+ clients engaged in conversations with consumers.
  In just a few months, Mastercard brought over 250 clients into live sessions with real consumers, giving them the chance to observe reactions to products, messaging, etc., ask questions, and hear insights firsthand. By making customer voices visible and accessible, these sessions are helping Mastercard’s clients make more confident decisions, faster than ever before.
  

• Moving faster and making smarter product decisions by leveraging AI agents.
  With Discuss’ AI agents, Mastercard is eliminating time-consuming manual analysis, allowing its team to focus on what matters most, delivering strategic insights. By automating summarization, quote extraction, and theme identification, teams can go from interviews to client-ready insights in just a few moments. This speed to insight has empowered their teams to move faster and ultimately support better, more customer-centric product decisions.

• Gaining global understanding of their consumers faster and more easily.
  With Discuss, Mastercard scaled its research across nearly a dozen markets in 8 languages in just a few months. The platform’s built-in global capabilities and centralized repository make it easier for teams across regions to access, share, and act on insights, no matter where the research was conducted.

• Adapting in real-time to meet the preferences of future generations like Gen Z.
  One of Mastercard’s first initiatives focused on understanding Gen Z, an aspirational, values-driven generation that craves instant gratification, flexibility, and balance. Through virtual interviews on Discuss, the team found that this group isn’t looking for extra services or perks, they want speed, simplicity, and tools that fit seamlessly into their lives. With these real-time insights, Mastercard is helping its clients tailor products and messaging to better connect with the next generation of banking customers.

With Discuss’ global, scalable, AI-powered solution, Mastercard is expanding the scope of its research both within and beyond the financial sector including into the healthcare space. Whether the goal is to understand emotionally nuanced topics through human-led interviews or to quickly test ideas at scale using AI interviews, Discuss provides the flexibility to adapt the method to the moment.

With this approach, Mastercard is setting a new standard for customer-centricity, delivering insights faster, scaling consumer understanding across teams, and embedding the voice of the customer into strategy across the entire organization.