This article was originally written for the fifth issue in the Advent 2025 semester of The Sewanee Purple and has been reproduced digitally.
Meran Paul
Features Editor
On Oct. 29, the Babson Center, along with the Department of French and the Department of Math and Computer Science, invited Mary Carol Harris (C ‘96) to serve as the Bryan View Points Speaker. Mary Carol Harris is a globally recognized executive in digital commerce and fintech. During her work with Apple, she drove the explosive international expansion of Apple Pay and its related Wallet services across Europe. Leveraging this global scale and product delivery success, she recently joined Airbnb as Senior Director of International Product Marketing to drive expansion across EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, LATAM (Latin America), and APAC (Asia Pacific). Mary Carol’s expertise is further anchored by formative roles at Visa and Telefonica-O2, pioneering early mobile payment propositions. A graduate of Sewanee and l’Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences-Po), she speaks fluent French and Italian, bringing a wealth of international savvy to the technology sector. While on Campus, Harris sat with The Sewanee Purple to share details of her work and life.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
I grew up on a farm in far western Kentucky, right on the Tennessee state line. I had a very unusual upbringing compared to where I live today, between London and Paris.
I was very fortunate to be able to come to Sewanee because when I was applying for universities, my dad had been laid off from his company. My family was struggling financially at the time, and I wasn’t sure if I would go to university at all. Sewanee was incredibly generous with its financial aid to me. I was a Wilkins scholar here. My time here is probably among my top experiences, even though I’ve had a very adventurous and international career.
From Sewanee, I left the U.S. and went to France. I’ve lived in a number of big European capitals – Paris, for a total of seven years, London for over 20 years, and I also lived in Rome for a year.
What was your Sewanee experience like, and how did it lead you to the path of business?
I studied a lot. I felt like I wasn’t as prepared for my education here. So I worked really, really hard. I applied the value of hard work that I learned from growing up in this small town at Sewanee. At Sewanee, I was very active in student life. I was in a sorority, PKE. I was a proctor. I was on the student discipline committee. I played golf. I really tried to be active and take advantage of all the opportunities here. I think the multidisciplinary nature of what I learned here, the questioning and the constant curiosity that a liberal arts education really creates for you, has served me very well in business.
One of the pivotal things that I did here was to go on a European studies semester abroad, and it was actually my mother who filled out the application for me. She basically told me that I was going to do this. And it changed my life because I’d never had the opportunity to travel internationally like that. I saw this really big, different world.
How did you decide to focus your career on the world of financial technology and digital commerce?
As a little girl, I didn’t dream of growing up and going into payments or business. I was probably thinking I wanted to be an astronaut. Before that, I wanted to go into the foreign service. I did an internship in the American Embassy in Paris, and I was really disappointed. It was not entrepreneurial enough. It didn’t move fast enough. I had no idea what I was going to do, so I shelved the idea of going into the Foreign Service.
I stumbled upon financial services and international business when a friend of mine was setting up a mobile payment startup company in Paris, and it was the year 2000. It was right at the beginning of that. We knew that this was going to be something that was going to take off, but it was still really early, the handsets were still very primitive, and the networks weren’t really developed. The company ended up failing, like a lot of startups. But it gave me the foundation to understand how payments worked. From that, I was on to something.
I moved to London and worked for 02 on mobile payments, which is the equivalent of 18-tier Verizon here. We thought that the carriers were going to be the ones to drive this because they controlled how handsets got into the hands of consumers.
I worked on a project putting a Visa card on a phone that would allow you to pay for the first time. I thought to myself, if this is going to take off, you need to be working for a company that has a lot to lose if they don’t get it right. So, I decided to work for Visa for six years and really helped in the industry, putting the basic building blocks in place. I did that for six years, and we were waiting for one outlier in the industry to come out with a device that would support mobile payment capability, and that was Apple. We started to see some really high-quality smartphones and other devices come to the market. You could put your digital versions of your cards onto these phones for tap-and-go payments.
When Apple launched Apple Pay, it was the pivotal moment because we could have an amazing device that was in the hands of early adopters to drive mobile payments forward at scale. I was contacted by Apple for a job to be one of the first employees in Europe to roll it out there. Obviously, I took the opportunity. And from there, I developed relationships and did projects with lots of different companies, which then led me to my next opportunity.
You mentioned that you served as a broadcaster and journalist for Vatican Radio in Rome. How do you think the skills that you gain there help you succeed in the business world?
One of the things I learned there was that people are much more comfortable and will tell you more if you can speak their language. I was rare amongst the crew journalists, because I spoke all three languages that we were broadcasting in: English, French, and Italian. In business, I learned that some of the most difficult contractual negotiations I had to do were often made easier in countries where I could speak the language. That served me very well in business
The second one was the ability to be curious enough to ask why, to try to understand other people’s perspectives. When you’re a journalist, you have carte blanche to do that because you’re trying to get the story. You’re trying to get perspective. When I was at the Vatican, I had these amazing people that I interviewed: politicians, diplomats, artists, writers, many of whom had very different perspectives about things going on in the world. Being able to ask the right questions and to really be able to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes is to understand their perspective. And that’s served me quite well.
You were there from the very beginning of Apple Pay’s launch. What was the most challenging or surprising part of bringing that service to life in Europe?
There are a lot of challenges, and this point is not specific to Apple. It’s sort of broader than Americans doing business overseas. Sometimes companies don’t want to work with you. There is a know-how and a power that American businesses have that is envied abroad, but sometimes it can be quite threatening. Because it could be contrary to ways of living, culture, and jobs in local markets. We definitely had some resistance in a number of markets to try to get the service live. But we overcame this because the consumer proposition was so strong.
You’ve worked in key roles based in London and across Europe. What’s the single biggest lesson you’ve learned about launching a product in a new country?
You have to adapt it. I see a lot of companies, not the ones that I’ve worked for, but I see a lot of companies try to parachute the same product into markets without that tailoring or that refinement for the local market. And this is more than just translation, right? This is about you doing payments, you have to accept, and you have to offer the local payment methods. In payments, sometimes people have different ways of authenticating themselves in local markets. They have different habits about what technologies are used. They’re more security-conscious in some markets than in others. You have to do that last mile of customization so it’s tailored for the markets. The experience and the overall product have to be recognizable, which creates consistency and therefore translates into an opportunity for scale.
You made a big switch to Airbnb to combine your love of travel and adventure with your job. What excites you most about your new role?
The geographical Remit is very exciting, because I’ve spent the last 25 years working primarily in Europe. With this role, I’m building a team internationally that covers Asia Pacific as well as Latin America. Having that opportunity to learn and work in those other markets and regions is quite exciting for me. My perspective is that every experience in life gives you something that you carry forward in your career. That’s why I think all the work that I’ve done in Europe, a patchwork of countries, prepared me for taking on a broader geographical remit.
But nonetheless, those markets are very different. I’m excited about digging in and learning more about how to be successful in those markets. It is a different industry, completely different from payments. The opportunity to reinvent myself and start something new is exciting.
How do you manage to balance the demands of your work with your personal life interests?
Very poorly generally. I like creating things. I like building things. Definitely in business, I’m what’s known as a builder. In my personal life, the things that I enjoy mirror that. I love planning things and seeing them grow over time, with patience. I love the renovation projects that I’ve been involved with, gradually seeing them evolve and transform. That’s quite gratifying for me. My hobbies lie in where I’m able to, over time, transform things from something that’s not that great into something that’s magnificent.
I travel a lot. I travel a lot for my job. Fortunately, I like traveling, so I have made it my job, if that makes sense. It’s a big question because having a career in international business can really eat into your personal life. Everyone, however, has their own balance that they have to find and strike.
What’s one piece of advice you would give to a Sewanee student today?
There was a point in my life where I realized that I couldn’t plan everything. After that, I just took life as it came to me. In fact, before leaving Sewanee for study abroad, I thought I was going to come back and go to law school. I asked my professor for a recommendation, and they refused. I asked her, “Why won’t you write me a recommendation? I’ve been a great student. This is important to me”. She said, “I want you to just see where this year abroad takes you. I don’t want you to plan everything. There’s always time to come back and fly to law school, if that’s what you want to do”. That was the best advice.
I probably would have made a big mistake. It was too early for me to plan my life and decide what I wanted to do. Things, then, fell into place for me. I ended up working in an industry that is fascinating. My advice would be that it’s okay to not have a plan. Let life discover you in vice versa because there are paths and careers that don’t exist today, but will be made possible with new technology revolutions. If you are too set on one particular path today, you may not be able to see the future.