LAS VEGAS — At the Money20/20 USA conference, Mastercard introduced Mastercard Threat Intelligence, a new cybersecurity platform designed to help banks and merchants detect, prevent, and respond to cyber-enabled payment fraud at scale.
The launch comes less than a year after Mastercard completed its acquisition of Recorded Future, a leading threat-intelligence company. The integration signals the payments giant’s effort to bridge the long-standing divide between cybersecurity and financial-fraud defenses — two domains increasingly intertwined as criminal operations evolve.
According to Mastercard, the platform combines its extensive fraud insights and network visibility with Recorded Future’s global cyber-intelligence feeds. The goal: to deliver unified, actionable intelligence for identifying malicious domains, payment-card testing activities, and emerging digital-skimming threats before they impact consumers and merchants.
Bridging the Divide Between Fraud and Cybersecurity
For years, financial institutions have treated fraud and cybersecurity as separate problems, despite overlapping roots. Mastercard executives say that distinction is becoming obsolete.
“Fraud rarely starts at the point of transaction — it often originates as a cyberattack,” said Johan Gerber, global head of Security Solutions at Mastercard. “Innovation is now an imperative as the lines between cybercrime and financial crime continue to blur.”
Industry research underscores the urgency: nearly 60 percent of global fraud leaders say they only learn of cyber breaches after losses occur. Mastercard’s initiative aims to change that by fusing intelligence across the payment ecosystem — from issuing banks to merchants — and facilitating real-time collaboration between fraud and security teams.
Tracy Kitten Goldberg, director of Cybersecurity at Javelin Strategy & Research, called the effort “a key step toward cross-sector threat intelligence.”
“Vendors with broad transactional data will be crucial in improving information-sharing across the industry,” she said.
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Inside the Platform: From Skimming to Card Testing
Mastercard Threat Intelligence applies advanced analytics and real-time monitoring to track patterns that precede payment fraud. Among its core features are:
Card testing detection: Alerts and automated declines of fraudulent test transactions to protect cardholders.
Digital skimming intelligence: Quantitative data to help institutions assess and disrupt card-related malware.
Merchant threat intelligence: Insights into merchant-level risk to enable faster incident response.
Payment ecosystem threat reports: Weekly intelligence briefings on emerging vulnerabilities across the global payments landscape.
Payment intelligence reports: Actionable case studies and fraud-trend analyses to guide defense strategies.
Mastercard says early trials helped its partners identify and dismantle malicious domains linked to $120 million in fraud, affecting nearly 9,500 e-commerce sites in just six months.
From Reactive Response to Proactive Mitigation
The company’s long-term ambition is to make fraud prevention anticipatory rather than reactive.
“Feeding threat intel across disparate teams in meaningful ways helps organizations move from reactive response to proactive mitigation,” said Goldberg.
Irvin Salinas Pineda, a fraud expert at Banco Mercantil del Norte, noted that Mastercard’s new tool will “keep pace with main threats and trends — something not possible today due to the high demands on banking operations.”
