Michael Miebach (born 1968 in Bavaria) is a German manager and, since January 2021, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the US financial services provider Mastercard. He previously held positions including Chief Product Officer and President at Mastercard and worked for Citibank and Barclays.
Miebach was born in the Allgäu region in 1968 and grew up in Obergünzburg and, for a time, in Hamburg. [1] He studied business administration at the University of Passau, where he earned a master's degree. [2] [3] He also completed further training at Harvard Business School. Miebach began his professional career in 1994 at Citibank in Frankfurt am Main. He later moved to Barclays Bank, where he was a managing director, before joining credit card provider Mastercard in 2010. [1] [3]
At Mastercard, Miebach initially took charge of developing the business in the Middle East and Africa region. [4] In 2016, he was promoted to Chief Product Officer and played a key role in expanding Mastercard's previously card-centric offering into a broader payment platform with new areas such as real-time payments, open banking, and digital identity. [5] During the transition period prior to the CEO change, Miebach was appointed President in March 2020 before taking over as head of the company on January 1, 2021, succeeding Ajay Banga. [3]
Miebach is considered one of the most influential German business leaders abroad, as Mastercard is one of the 20 most valuable publicly traded companies in the world, with a market capitalization of around €470 billion (as of January 2025). [1] He was appointed to the Board of Directors of the technology group IBM in 2023. He is a member of high-level committees such as the Business Roundtable in the US, the international advisory board of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum and the boards of the Metropolitan Opera, the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum and the World Resources Institute. [5] In 2025, he also joined the Board of Governors of the American Red Cross. [6]