‘They call me Ms. Mastercard’: A long-serving employee looks back on decades of change

A few years before Ewing was hired, credit cards were facing an existential crisis. In the early 1970s, salesclerks were still dialing in requests to authorize a credit card transaction. As the clerk waited on the line (and the customer grew increasingly impatient), an agent on the other end might be poring through a gigantic binder of account records to determine whether to approve the sale. This could take anywhere from five to 20 minutes — and that was if the customer and the merchant used the same bank. The process was even longer when the issuing bank had to call the merchant’s bank.

The solution was technology: specifically, the first links in a communications network that would become the backbone of Mastercard’s global operations. By 1971, merchants served by St. Louis-based Credit Systems Incorporated (CSI), the processor for Interbank members in the southern Midwest, could simply phone its regional authorization hub, where operators keyed in transaction details for near-instant decisions from a refrigerator-sized computer.

Two years later, CSI helped Mastercard launch the first nationwide system of computer-to-computer communications between issuers and acquirers. The average time for a transaction dropped to a matter of seconds.

In her early Mastercard days, Ewing sat in front of a cathode-ray monitor answering merchants’ calls and running card numbers through the computer system. Impressed by her enthusiasm, in 1979 a higher-up offered her a position at Mastercard’s new data center just outside St. Louis. Officially, she became the secretary to the vice president of operations, but everyone on the 30-person staff pitched in as needed. For example, when the phones weren’t ringing, Ewing learned to prepare punch cards, a hallmark of 1970s computing, photo below..

The developer — yes, singular; there was only one in Mastercard’s St. Louis operation then — wrote out his code by hand; it was Ewing’s job to type it into the key-punch machine, which translated the characters into holes in cardboard cards that could be read by a computer.

“I became the jack of all trades,” she says. “I was intrigued by everything we were doing, and I wanted to understand how it all worked.” 

As the technology changed, so did workplace culture. “There were mind-blowing changes in business,” she says. “We finally got an HR department. That was a pretty big change. I’m like, ‘What does HR do?’ We had two people in HR who kept us in order.”

Before Mastercard relaxed the dress code around 2000, those who wanted to wear jeans paid — literally — for the privilege (the money went to charity). “In the early days, we had to wear pantyhose every single day,” Ewing says. “Guys wore ties; they wore suits every day.”

Today the St. Louis team embraces flex time and hybrid work, but in the early years they stuck to a strict schedule: clock in, clock out, five days a week. The tradeoff was a close-knit staff that met downstairs for peanuts and beer every Friday. “People smoked in the office,” she laughs. “That was crazy.”