Mastercard Names Merit Janow Board Chair as Ajay Banga Departs

Mastercard Inc. named Merit Janow as its next chair, the largest U.S. financial firm to elevate a woman to the seat atop its board.

Janow, who is also as a dean and professor of international economic law and international affairs at Columbia University, will take over in January, Mastercard said Tuesday in a statement. She succeeds Ajay Banga, who was Mastercard’s chief executive officer for over a decade.

She joins a rare circle of roughly two dozen women leading public company boards in the S&P 500 Index. Mastercard is the second-largest company among those firms behind Tesla Inc., ...