Mastercard Innovation & Technology Culture

In an era where fraud and cybercrime are converging at unprecedented speed, Mastercard is taking a decisive step forward. Our acquisition of Recorded Future, the world’s largest threat intelligence company, marks a turning point not just for Mastercard, but for the entire financial ecosystem. 

In a podcast interview with Risky Business News, Michael Lashlee, Mastercard’s Chief Security Officer (CSO), shared why this move is more than just a business decision, it’s a strategic investment in trust, resilience, and the future of payments security. 

Why threat intelligence? Why now? 

Fraud is no longer just a financial issue; it’s a cybersecurity crisis. In 2024 alone, U.S. consumers lost over $12.5 billion to scams, while global fraud losses exceeded $1 trillion. With AI enabling attackers to scale and innovate, businesses face an arms race where the side with the best data, models, and computing power wins. 

160B+ transactions annually 

Mastercard processes over 160 billion transactions annually, providing unique insights into fraud patterns and emerging cyber threats. By integrating this data with Recorded Future’s intelligence engine, Mastercard can deliver real-time, actionable insights and predictive analytics to clients worldwide. 

This collaboration strengthens fraud detection, accelerates response times, and helps organizations move from reactive defense to proactive resilience. 

The bigger picture: collaboration and global defense 

Cybercrime is no longer the domain of lone hackers; it’s driven by organized criminal groups and even nation-states. Mastercard actively partners with regulators, law enforcement, and industry bodies, such as Interpol and Europol, to share intelligence and disrupt criminal ecosystems. 

Today, Mastercard participates in more than 50 global initiatives aimed at building a safer digital economy. As Lashlee shares in the podcast: 
“Security is a shared responsibility. By combining intelligence, technology, and trust, we can help organizations navigate complexity and build a safer digital economy for everyone.” 

Threat intelligence as a strategic investment 

As AI evolves, Mastercard Threat Intelligence will leverage advanced analytics to deliver precise, code-level defenses. Beyond technology, Mastercard is fostering transparency and collaboration across borders, enabling cross-industry information sharing to reduce losses and strengthen trust. 

Threat intelligence is no longer a technical tool; it’s a strategic investment and a market differentiator. By combining intelligence, technology, and trust, Mastercard is setting a new standard for cybersecurity in payments. 

The goal? A safer, more connected financial ecosystem for everyone. 

On how effective cybersecurity depends on threat intelligence that spans sectors and regions: 

“Vendors with broad transactional data and analytics will play a key role in improving information-sharing among financial services, merchants and across the industry. New doors are opening for advanced threat intel, facilitated through successful cyber fusion that incorporates a myriad of tools across identity verification, fraud detection, and indicators of compromise. Feeding threat intel across disparate teams and industries in meaningful and useful ways will help fraud and cybersecurity teams more readily identify trends, placing them in positions to move from reactive response to proactive mitigation.”

At Mastercard, technologists build in an environment where trust, security, and reliability are essential. The work combines the scale and stability of a global technology company with the rigor of financial infrastructure, giving teams the opportunity to create secure digital payment experiences while contributing to a broader mission and real-world impact.

“When it comes to payment and money, the topic of trust and the feeling of security is important. For technologists working at Mastercard, they can expect the security of a large tech company with the reliability requirements of financial infrastructure. But there’s something unexpected they will experience, too: mission and impact”

On Mastercard's new large tabular model (LTM):

“Our new foundation model analyzes the same data with very limited human input as a starting point, learning more independently what the important characteristics of the data are. In this way, the LTM could identify new connections in the data that a human might not find on their own.”