Mastercard is going on a recruitment spree for tech staff in Dublin
The payments giant is planning to fill 175 new roles by 2020.
PAYMENTS TECH GIANT Mastercard has announced plans to hire dozens of new tech workers for its Dublin office.
The company said it is looking to add 175 staff to its 380-person workforce in Leopardstown over the next two years.
Roles include software engineers, data scientists, project managers, product designers and information security experts.
A Mastercard spokeswoman told Fora: “We’ll be filling all the roles by 2020, and possibly even more.”
The news comes weeks after the company announced a restructuring to bring together the digital and physical payment workforce under one grouping, dubbed the ‘products and innovation team’.
As well as housing the payment behemoth’s Irish operations, the Leopardstown office is home to its research and development wing, Mastercard Labs.
The decision to restructure coincided with the departure of Garry Lyons, who set up the R&D wing here six years ago.
Pushing the boundaries
The company claims the Mastercard Labs unit is “pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in payments and beyond”.
It is taking a punt on emerging technologies such as virtual and augmented reality and working with chatbots to facilitate payments within messaging apps.
Mastercard said its Dublin-based staff are also looking at ways to use artificial intelligence to help make payments more secure.
The company’s Ireland country manager, Sonya Geelon, said Mastercard was “really proud to be investing further in our Irish presence”.
Ken Moore, who is the new head of Mastercard Labs, said that within the company Dublin was “admired as a key technology hub”.
“We need great minds who can look outside of Mastercard’s traditional payments expertise and create solutions to benefit our customers around the world, and I’m excited to grow our business here,” he said.
The latest accounts for Mastercard’s Irish operations show it recorded €18.5 million in revenue in 2016 – up from €15.9 million the previous year.
However losses swelled to nearly €31 million for the year, pushing its accumulated losses to more than €112 million since 2011.
