Ronel Lundall and the business of opening doors

In 1994, a bank chief executive in South Africa gave Ronel Lundall an opportunity. The advice that came with it was economical: “Be authentic, work smart, and ask questions.” It is the sort of sentence that fits comfortably on a desk calendar. Living by it takes rather longer. Lundall has said she understood its full value later, after her career had given her younger leaders to advise in turn.

That exchange offers a useful beginning for a career now associated with global payments. Lundall is Executive Vice President and CEO of Mastercard Transaction Services, based in Dubai. The title carries the vocabulary of a large financial technology business. The early advice carries something more portable: permission to bring a distinct perspective into the room, do the work and keep asking.

Her first CEO ran a South African civil servants bank. In Lundall’s recollection, he wanted change at the management table and saw potential in her. She remembers both sides of that bargain: his willingness to offer an opening and her responsibility to make something of it. A chance was consequential. It also came with work attached.

A working education in moving money

Before her later Mastercard leadership roles, Lundall founded a payments consulting business. Its focus was concrete: supporting payment operations at banks across Africa and working on mobile-payment proofs of concept with selected central banks. The geography matters, but so does the scale of the assignment. A proof of concept is where an attractive possibility must begin answering inconvenient practical questions.

Can an idea work within a bank’s operations? How does it fit the institutions expected to support it? Those are questions suggested by the work itself, rather than claims about any particular project she delivered. They help explain why payments careers often unfold out of public view. A customer sees money arrive. The operating work has to happen before that reassuring moment.

Consulting also belongs in her story because it places entrepreneurship alongside corporate leadership. Lundall has occupied both positions. Her later appointments span International Markets, Operations & Technology, and Product & Engineering at Mastercard. Across those functions, the recurring subject is delivery: bringing different kinds of expertise into a service that can operate beyond an initial proposal.

The world beyond the rollout

Lundall relocated to Dubai with Mastercard in 2014. She later worked in the United Kingdom before returning to Dubai. By 2018, she was identified as Executive Vice President, Vocalink Delivery. In 2020, she was London-based and responsible for Global Delivery New Payment Platforms, with a brief involving market rollouts across North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific.

A list of regions can make international work sound tidier than it is. A rollout means the same broad ambition must survive different operating circumstances. Lundall’s job description placed her at that junction between a global platform and its market-level execution. The travel implied by the résumé is only one part of the work; the coordination is the more revealing part.

In September 2020, she appeared on WinTrade Global Talks in a discussion presented around digitization and leadership through disruption. The invitation put an operating executive into a conversation about how teams are led. That pairing would recur: delivery responsibilities on one side, questions about the people carrying them on the other.

Fifteen promotions. Twelve mentees.

Her 2018 EMpower recognition provides a particularly useful snapshot. Ranked 85 on its Top 100 Ethnic Minority Executives list, Lundall was credited with promoting 15 ethnically diverse employees during her leadership of Customer Delivery in the Middle East Africa region. The same entry recorded 12 ethnically diverse employees whom she was personally mentoring.

Those figures belong to a specific period. Their value is their specificity. Mentoring can otherwise become a pleasantly vague word, agreeable to everyone and demanding very little of anyone. A dozen individual relationships suggests time, attention and a willingness to engage with the particular problems another person brings.

The same recognition described two years of volunteering and lecturing for a nonprofit supporting disadvantaged business owners of ethnic descent in South Africa. Her work also included sharing her career story with employees of African descent and sponsoring Women in Leadership in Middle East Africa. The activity extended beyond offering a successful example for others to admire.

A seat, and the work around it

Lundall was the first senior female representative to serve on Mastercard’s regional operating committee. That distinction sits alongside her sponsorship work. Being present at a management table and helping others progress toward one are related achievements, with different demands. Representation changes who participates in a decision. Sponsorship asks what happens before a person is invited to participate.

By November 2021, her responsibilities included executive sponsorship of Leading Employees of African Descent, Mastercard’s employee resource group, and work with colleagues on the company’s In Solidarity Plan. That month she was listed among the speakers for an LSE discussion titled Black Women are Missing from the Table, alongside figures including Erika Brodnock, Pavita Cooper and Lorna Hinds-Sotomey.

The event, chaired by Grace Lordan, examined barriers to progression and actions available to firms, managers and individuals. It gave a public setting to a subject already visible in Lundall’s mentoring record. The question had moved beyond whether a woman could reach a senior position. It included the decisions that determine how many others get a fair opportunity to follow.

Room for an honest answer

Another 2021 conversation brought her together with Amy Neale and host Latoya Bennett-Johnson on Mastercard’s Inside the Circles podcast. Their subject was authentic leadership, including career journeys and mentoring from both sides of the relationship. Lundall was then described as a London-based executive leading customer delivery for the New Payment Platforms business.

Authenticity is easy to recommend in the abstract. Inside a large organization, it must coexist with responsibilities to a team, customers and colleagues. The interest in Lundall’s account is the connection to her early advice: asking questions remained compatible with holding authority. Seniority did not have to make curiosity an embarrassing habit to conceal.

In a later public exchange about leadership, she emphasized trust, feedback and clear priorities. She also advocated being transparent when an answer is unavailable. There is a certain administrative elegance to admitting that. It allows a team to work on the question rather than spend its energy interpreting an executive performance of certainty.

The permissions beneath the payment

At Mastercard Transaction Services, Lundall’s brief concerns the regulatory payments footprint supporting multiple Mastercard products. A 2025 account described the aim as an efficient license-as-a-service organization. In plain language, the ambition is to organize regulated capabilities so that different products can use them. The customer-facing service rests on institutional permissions and operating responsibilities underneath.

That makes the role a useful continuation of her earlier work. African banking operations, mobile-payment experiments and international platform delivery each involved translating an ambition into something institutions could execute. Transaction Services places the regulated business itself at the center. The apparent simplicity of sending money sits above a rather fuller organizational diagram.

By 2021, Lundall was already being identified as the executive heading the business. Her current public description adds the CEO designation. The continuity is worth keeping in view: this is an operating responsibility developed over time, connected to the less visible machinery that lets a payment service function across markets.

Back in the classroom, still accountable

Hult International Business School identifies Lundall as a Global Online MBA student. She also joined its The Anatomy of a Crisis roundtable with Ahmed El Banna and Sayed Shah, facilitated by Belisa Marochi. The conversation addressed judgement under pressure and leadership when information is incomplete. An executive career and a student identity were sharing the same introduction.

Her own reflections on AI describe a commitment to formal study alongside executive responsibilities. She argues for deliberate decisions about what people retain, what agents do and where judgement remains essential. The principle she puts first is direct:

“Accountability cannot be delegated to an Algorithm.”

Ronel Lundall, October 2026

It is a fitting place for her career story to arrive. The questions have changed since that early banking opportunity. The responsibility to ask them has survived. So has the need for someone to make room for the next person who has something useful to contribute.

The opportunity she received in 1994 also offers a practical question for anyone reading from a position of authority. A career takes individual effort, but appointments, advice and access involve other people. Lundall’s record keeps those people in the frame. Success has an organizational history as well as a personal one.