Cover As executive vice president of marketing and communications for Mastercard Asia-Pacific, Julie Nestor bridges lived family experience with enterprise strategy to make travel and dining spaces accessible for neurodivergent guests across the region. Photographed exclusively for Tatler Asia by Darren Leow
As executive vice president of marketing and communications for Mastercard Asia-Pacific, Julie Nestor bridges lived family experience with enterprise strategy to make travel and dining spaces accessible for neurodivergent guests across the region. Photographed exclusively for Tatler Asia by Darren Leow
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Neurodivergence doesn't announce itself, but sensory overload can quickly cut a family outing short. Through innovative menus and regional partnerships, Julie Nestor and the Mastercard team are working to take the guesswork out of public spaces across Asia-Pacific
Julie Nestor runs her calendar with precision as a necessity: what gets her attention, and what doesn't. As executive vice president of marketing and communications for Mastercard Asia-Pacific, she moves between markets, stakeholders and problems-in-progress by a single rule—know what needs you today, and let the rest wait its turn. "You might be quite involved in a particular challenge in India and the next thing you've got to do is immediately switch to a people situation in Australia," she says. "The hardest part is probably just the brain navigation."
It's a discipline she has practiced somewhere else first.
Nestor has a 13-year-old autistic son. She mentions it plainly in conversation about a Mastercard initiative—and it recontextualises everything she says about her approach. Because the version of Julie Nestor who closes every meeting with, "okay, we all agree this is what we're doing," and who breaks an overwhelming month down into "what do I have to get done in these next two days"—aren’t just an executive's productivity hack. They are the operating system of someone who manages a very different kind of unpredictability at home—one that doesn't end when the laptop closes. Where professional challenges can be managed and wrapped up at some level of end point, raising her neurodivergent son is an open-ended reality.
‘I don’t have two personas," she says. "I take a similar frame in my personal life, trying not to endlessly worry about what next year will look like. I think more about what is the challenge and opportunity this week that we need to solve, and where can I get support and help that I need to make it all work."
Managing through 48-hour windows
Above Julie Nestor speaking at the April 2026 launch of Mastercard’s ‘Time for Acceptance’ campaign in Singapore, which brought together commercial partners to normalize hidden disabilities in public spaces. (Photo: courtesy of Mastercard)
Julie Nestor speaking at the April 2026 launch of Mastercard’s ‘Time for Acceptance’ campaign in Singapore, which brought together commercial partners to normalize hidden disabilities in public spaces. (Photo: courtesy of Mastercard)
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Nestor protects her focus across a portfolio as sprawling as Mastercard Asia-Pacific's, and describes it as triage. "I try and think about what things only I can do versus what things I can help lead the team to, but they can do themselves," she says. "That might be bringing certain stakeholders together to create better alignment, or thinking more strategically about a certain investment. Those things are where my time goes." Everything else, she does her best to delegate and let go of, on the condition that someone else has "enough direction" to run with it.
The same applies to time itself. Rather than confronting a month at once —"I'm just going to freak out," she admits—she breaks every week down to what has to happen in the next 48 hours. "Then I can breathe a bit more. It doesn't feel so consuming."
That same instinct, it turns out, is the reason Mastercard's neurodivergent-accessibility work exists.
Read more: This speech app is transforming the way children with autism learn to communicate
The unseen friction: narrowing the focus to hidden disabilities
When Mastercard began examining disability inclusion across Asia Pacific—a region where persons with disabilities represent an estimated 750 million individuals, according to the UN's Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Escap)—the initiative could have addressed disability broadly and stopped there. Instead, it narrowed toward neurodivergence specifically, because, as Nestor puts it, "it's not so obvious to people." Hidden disabilities don't announce themselves. A child stimming, or mid-meltdown, in public reads to strangers as something else entirely—and the families living with that reality, she found, had quietly stopped participating in public life altogether. Drawing on external industry research during early planning, her team confronted a sobering statistic: as many as nine in 10 families with an autistic child or adult have never taken a family vacation, held back by unpredictable environments and social stigma alike.
Nestor doesn't view that third-party data as abstract numbers. She frames it as something she recognises firsthand. "One of the insights for me, living in Singapore, was really that it's not very well understood," she says.
Above A traveller receives a Hidden Disabilities Sunflower lanyard at Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER). Used internationally across airports, retail malls, and hospitality venues, the wearable quietly signals to staff that a guest has a non-visible condition and may require additional time, patience, or accommodation. (Photo: Paul Zinken/picture alliance via Getty Images)
A traveller receives a Hidden Disabilities Sunflower lanyard at Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER). Used internationally across airports, retail malls, and hospitality venues, the wearable quietly signals to staff that a guest has a non-visible condition and may require additional time, patience, or accommodation. (Photo: Paul Zinken/picture alliance via Getty Images)
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It shows up in smaller ways. She notices the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower lanyards—the global symbol for non-visible conditions—whenever she travels, using their presence to tell her how a place accommodates families like hers. She'd seen them regularly at airports elsewhere, but rarely in Singapore. That gap directly shaped the first phase of Mastercard's campaign when it launched in 2024, with distributing the wearables forming a key part of its initial call to action.
Nestor had previously spoken about a visit to a furniture store to buy a sofa with her son. Rather than the standard sales pitch, staff asked practical questions about her family's needs—and after she mentioned her son prefers eating meals on the sofa, they steered her toward fabrics and finishes that would hold up to that. "Knowing their team understood autism and special needs made me feel very comfortable bringing him with me to the store to shop for a sofa, something I would not have done before," she said. "In the end, I purchased a fantastic lounge, so it was a great outcome for our family and for the business as well."
Read more: Visible impact: how Hong Kong film 'Invisible Differences' is changing perceptions of neurodiversity
Scaling for impact and innovation
As the initiative grew, Nestor was conscious about stepping back to let her team manage and drive its execution. "I've always been a bit worried about anyone thinking this was a Julie Nestor project," she says. It's the kind of worry that only makes sense given how close this work sits to her own life, where institutional initiative and personal cause could easily blur.
Mastercard leaned in to long-standing partner St Andrew's Autism Centre who could convene other organisations in ways a corporate brand couldn't; and to her own team, who took the idea further than she asked for. “Sensory Notes,” Mastercard's programme that describes dishes in clear, literal terms (texture, taste, intensity, preparation, presentation) so neurodivergent diners know what to expect before food arrives, was first piloted at the 2026 Australian Open and brought to Singapore soon after; it's now expanding to hotel partners, including an upcoming rollout with Conrad Singapore Orchard. An even clearer example of her team taking initiative came next: working with Accenture Song, they developed a tool that allows any restaurant to generate a Sensory Notes menu directly from its existing menu URL in under ten minutes.
Above Rod Laver Arena during the Australian Open 2026. The Grand Slam tournament served as the debut testing ground for Mastercard’s Sensory Notes—a clear-language menu framework designed to reduce unpredictability for autistic and neurodivergent diners before rolling out regionally. (Photo: James D. Morgan/Getty Images)
Rod Laver Arena during the Australian Open 2026. The Grand Slam tournament served as the debut testing ground for Mastercard’s Sensory Notes—a clear-language menu framework designed to reduce unpredictability for autistic and neurodivergent diners before rolling out regionally. (Photo: James D. Morgan/Getty Images)
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"That, to me, is such a rewarding part of my day," Nestor says, "when I see something that I haven't asked for or expected, and someone's just run with it."
Families who've encountered the results—the awareness campaigns, the adoption of the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower wearables, the expanding network of Sensory Notes partners—send Mastercard a version of the same message, again and again: We don’t feel so alone.
"Having a single family member tell you that they don't feel so alone coping with what could be a very challenging situation," Nestor says, "is enormously gratifying."
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Karen Vera is the regional content director for Tatler Asia. Having led editorial strategy across Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila, Jakarta, and Shanghai throughout her career, she is a devoted culture vulture whose favorite party trick is naming every Oscar Best Picture winner from 1972 onwards. (Annie Hall won in 1977, by the way.)
