Liz Oakes

Liz Oakes is Executive Vice President, Market Development of New Payment Platforms at Mastercard. She works with governments, central banks, regulators, schemes, retail and commercial banks on the strategic development of real-time payments programs across the globe, in collaboration with regional teams.

Liz has more than 20 years’ experience in designing central clearing and settlement systems and bank payments systems, globally. This includes the governance and functional design of SEPA, Faster Payments and Bacs systems in the UK, and real-time payments systems strategy and design for national payments infrastructure operators in Australia, India, Singapore, Sweden and the USA. Liz has also supported the design and roll out of new payment systems within bank environments and is focused on the customer experience impact of real-time/instant payments, Open Banking and PSD2.

Liz joined Mastercard in 2018 from McKinsey & Company, where she was an expert associate partner in its global payments practice. During her tenure, she served financial institutions, payments businesses and investors on strategy, design and implementation of payment systems, regulation including PSD2 and Open Banking, and supported mergers and acquisitions activity.

In 2016, Liz joined McKinsey from KPMG, where she provided strategic, operational and functional payments advisory services to clients. She was heavily involved in the development of enhanced data and capabilities for real time payments and the implementation of the ISO 20022 XML messaging standard. Earlier in her career, Liz worked at Vocalink, now part of Mastercard, most recently driving product management, strategy and customer engagement.

Liz holds a Bachelor of Arts in Business Studies & German from the University of Hertfordshire. She lives in London.