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.”

What tools support your day-to-day work?

We have a robust set of team-level rhythms, supported by open and candid communication norms, to ensure we can keep things moving and stay on the same page. This includes best-in-market tools for: whiteboarding and collaboration, project tracking, communication, news and market intelligence, and AI coaching.

Ultimately, tooling is about having a means to an end. The best collaboration comes from a baseline level of psychological safety and a leadership approach that focuses on coaching people as they work through a problem as a group. I don’t want to be the person telling them how to solve the problem and just enact the steps I think need to occur. I want them to figure out how to get to the goal and be opportunistic about the best ways to get there. A coaching approach to leading teams is better than any tool I’ve seen thus far. 

How does your team experiment?

For a successful experiment, teams need to start with the right mindset. My team has been hired for a professional orientation that is highly adaptable and able to navigate ambiguity. We’re always looking at the work in terms of “the art of the possible” — What would need to be true to achieve this vision?

Secondly, we bring a hypothesis orientation to the work. When we’re looking at a goal, we’re discussing ways we can break it down into pieces that can be validated or invalidated to learn enough to get us closer to something realistic and trustworthy.

Third, we each bring a unique point of view and have open, candid collaboration. I’m trained as a designer and bring classic service design and change management techniques. Another team member is a project management expert and another is a delivery expert.

And last but not least, we ensure our objectives are focused on achieving the business goal, not specifying how we do it. Experiments are all about adjusting an approach in response to data. This is especially important with our team’s focus on agentic AI and new business opportunities across the enterprise.

How does Mastercard adapt to change?

Established financial companies seem to go one of two ways — either they become more rigid, formal and risk-averse over time, or they become more dynamic and experimentation-oriented. From my seven years at Mastercard, we have certainly been trending in the latter direction. The R&D teams are at the leading edge, our products are innovating on what’s possible in this space, and our leadership is sponsoring new big bets that challenge preconceptions of what was versus what could be. 

It’s an exciting time to see our executives ask teams what evidence for their proposal exists and to see the areas they have de-risked as they work through the problem space. It’s rare to see an established company constantly challenging itself at reinvention, but it’s happening every day across the enterprise.