Mastercard Winter Internship Programme 2026

Internship Overview

Sales Analyst Intern, Winter Internship Program 2026 - Johannesburg, South Africa. We are looking for passionate and talented professionals, who share our vision for helping our customers in bringing one stop solutions to address their product needs in a fast and innovational way.

The Mastercard Internship Program offers penultimate year students an immersive experience to challenge the status quo, gain real work-life skills in a global company, drive decency and belonging, and grow their personal and professional development. We invite you to bring your passion, share your talent, and make the most of this truly priceless experience.

This Internship is part of the APEMEA business unit and serves as a core pipeline into the Graduate Programme the following year, which features two curated rotations across specialised Career Tracks. Internship roles are therefore aligned with these tracks, offering early exposure to the skills and experiences that will be further developed during the graduate journey.

Career Track 1. Sales and Business Development

As part of our Sales and Business Development track, you can expect to focus on strategic sales planning and consultative and solution selling.

These teams provide:

• Product expertise and help leverage Mastercard integrated solutions to drive sales and revenue goals.
• Is responsible for setting sales strategies as it relates to products that are aligned with geographical strategy and help identify and close sales leads.
• Market intelligence to product developers and managers to support design, development and implementation efforts.

Career Track 2. Product Management and Solutions

As part of our Product Management and Solutions track, you can expect to focus on user experience, product performance and ongoing management, customer needs and insights and architecting solutions.

These teams provide:

• The overall coordination, status reporting, financials, schedules and stability of project-oriented work efforts, ensuring that project goals and objectives are met within agreed time, scope and resource requirements
• Detailed project plans and manages all implementation processes within budget constraints

Skills learned across all experiences include:

• Payments knowledge
• Project management
• Data analytics
• Influencing and negotiation
• Strategic thinking
• Local market dynamics

Education Requirements

• Final / Penultimate Year Undergraduate or master’s degree students due to graduate in 2027.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills   
• Analytical and problem-solving skills 
• Strong strategic and conceptual aptitude 
• Ability to multi-task and prioritize multiple projects concurrently 
• High-energy, can-do attitude, very strong sense of ownership and desire to succeed with commensurate analytical, technical, and strategic skills   

Competencies We Value

We recruit for and value the following core competencies:

• Passion: Actively seeks responsibility and takes pride in delivering the highest quality results and recommendations to our clients. 
• Proven record of leadership in a work setting and/or through extracurricular activities.
• Analytic Excellence: Demonstrates a strong aptitude for structured problem solving, analytical and quantitative skills.
• Business Interest: Clear interest in the world of business, and intuition for the way that companies make decisions.
• Rapid Growth: Eagerness to learn quickly, both through Mastercard's structured training curriculum and organic development opportunities.
• Teamwork: Willingness to work within small teams to produce outstanding deliverables, with a will to win attitude.
• Integrity: Outstanding record of academic achievement.  Commitment to Mastercard's values of honesty and integrity with a willingness to embrace and learn from mistakes.
• Diverse Perspective: Brings a unique skillset or approach to the table in every client engagement or internal activity.
• Communication: Ability to communicate complex ideas effectively.  Excellent written and verbal communication skills.