Visa promotes Asia CMO Frederique Covington Corbett to global role

After spending over four years at Visa, as the financial services giant's head of marketing and cross border, Frederique Covington Corbett has been promoted to a new role.  As SVP of global brand strategy & planning, Covington Corbett will be reporting to Visa’s global CMO, Lynne Biggar, a role she will perform from Singapore until August 2021, before relocating to California, closer to her global team.

Covington Corbett confirmed the move in an email to Campaign, but declined to comment beyond.

She has been the senior vice president and head of marketing for Asia Pacific since joining Visa in 2016. In this role, she has delivered work supporting Visa’s strategies across 17 countries and seven clusters and has served on the global marketing and communications leadership team and Asia-Pacific leadership team.

Key highlights of her recent work include: pivoting Asia-Pacific marketing activity to new areas of business opportunity with ecommerce, contactless, and SMB campaigns; creating centres of excellence empowering local markets and planning the Olympic Games in Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022 (having executed the Korea Pyeongchang games in 2018).

A member of Campaign's Asia-Pacific Pacific Power List for two years successively, Covington Corbett launched several campaigns including Visa’s 'Tap to Pay' contactless campaign in India, the Wonderful Indonesia co-branding initiative with the country’s ministry of tourism, and the Visa 'Wellington on a Plate' festival in New Zealand. 

Beyond sports, Visa sponsored a wider gamut of activities including esports, fashion, music and dining. It backed the eSports—Hearthstone 2019 World Championship in Taiwan and used it as an opportunity to more than double digital payments during the event, while in Australia, the music and arts festival, Splendour in the Grass, went 100% cashless across 50,000 attendees.

In her new role, Covington Corbett will be responsible for developing and overseeing global brand strategies that enable Visa’s strategic priorities and support their deployment within all global regions and markets. She will lead company-wide efforts to evolve the Visa brand through a new emphasis on corporate purpose and future-proof the brand for the digital world.

Having been in marketing leadership roles for over 25 years at Visa, Twitter, Microsoft and WPP both in US (New York, Los Angeles) and Asia, she will be based in the Bay Area, remaining in Singapore through the Tokyo 2021 Olympic Games and relocating to California next summer.

Outside of work, Corbett has been pursuing a PhD and will graduate from Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology on December 18 this year, with a doctorate degree in Global Leadership and Change.