Speaker Biography      

Michael McNamara

Michael McNamara is the Senior Principal responsible for MasterCard SpendingPulse, an economic data service offered by Mastercard Data and Services. Mr. McNamara led the team that founded SpendingPulse in 2003. Over the past 20 years, Mr. McNamara’s team developed one of the first A.I. enabled information services that leverages Mastercard’s vast data assets to quantify and forecast economic conditions and consumer spending trends. The Payments, Merchant, Media and Government sectors are key consumers of SpendingPulse research.

Mr. McNamara and SpendingPulse data are frequently quoted in the media by outlets including: Reuters, Dow Jones, Associated Press, CNBC, CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC News. During the 2019 holiday season SpendingPulse information was quoted in over 3,300 articles and generated over 360 million media impressions for Mastercard.

Mr. McNamara has served as Chairman and remains an active member of the Conference of Business Economists. The purpose of the Conference is to bring together economists from the business world to discuss the economics of their own industries, to contribute to one another’s understanding of the broader problems concerning business, monetary and global conditions, and to contribute toward the preservation of the system of free enterprise. The Conference was founded in 1944.

Prior to joining MasterCard, Mr. McNamara was a managing analyst with Datamonitor Plc, a leading global market research organization headquartered in London. While at Datamonitor he managed the North American region of the financial service technology division. Before joining Datamonitor Michael was a small cap equity analyst with Royce Ebright & Associates, a member of the Royce family of mutual funds.

Mr. McNamara holds a BA in Economics from Fairfield University and an MBA from the F.W. Olin School of Business at Babson College.