At Money20/20 USA, Mastercard unveiled a major innovation poised to redefine the fight against financial crime — Mastercard Threat Intelligence, the first-ever threat intelligence solution specifically designed and deployed for the payments ecosystem at scale. This powerful new platform combines Mastercard’s unparalleled visibility across global payments with cyber threat intelligence from Recorded Future, a leading cybersecurity firm the company acquired in 2024. The result is a unified, intelligence-driven approach that enables banks, payment providers, and merchants to proactively detect, prevent, and mitigate cyber-enabled payment fraud.
A New Era in the Fight Against Fraud
Fraud has evolved far beyond the point-of-sale. Increasingly, payment fraud is born from sophisticated cyberattacks — data breaches, phishing campaigns, malware injection, and card skimming operations that begin long before a transaction ever occurs. According to Mastercard, 60% of global fraud leaders say they are notified of a breach only after financial losses have already taken place. This reactive model exposes organizations to unnecessary losses, reputation damage, and regulatory risk.
Mastercard Threat Intelligence aims to turn that paradigm on its head. By connecting cyber and fraud teams with shared intelligence, the solution provides a bridge between two traditionally siloed functions — cybersecurity and fraud prevention — enabling real-time collaboration and decision-making.
“As the lines between cybercrime and financial crime continue to blur, innovation is an imperative,” said Johan Gerber, Executive Vice President of Security and Cyber Innovation at Mastercard. “Mastercard Threat Intelligence provides customers with actionable, real-time, and targeted risk insights to disrupt fraudulent transactions, inform strategic defense, and enable a proactive approach.”
A Fusion of Cyber and Payment Intelligence
Mastercard Threat Intelligence is built on the premise that cybersecurity and financial data must work hand-in-hand to effectively combat modern threats. By leveraging Recorded Future’s advanced threat analysis capabilities alongside Mastercard’s extensive fraud detection infrastructure, the platform provides a comprehensive view of vulnerabilities across the entire payments value chain — from merchants and processors to card issuers and acquirers.
Key features of Mastercard Threat Intelligence include:
- Card Testing Detection: Enables real-time alerts and proactive transaction declines when fraudsters attempt to test stolen card data online. This helps financial institutions mitigate downstream fraud while protecting legitimate customers.
- Digital Skimming Intelligence: Provides detailed, quantitative data that allows banks and merchants to assess the impact of web-based skimming attacks, helping them identify and remove malicious scripts that compromise checkout pages.
- Merchant Threat Intelligence: Offers targeted insights on merchant risk levels and payment fraud patterns, allowing acquiring banks to act faster when indicators of compromise emerge.
- Payment Ecosystem Threat Reports: Delivers weekly intelligence updates on new vulnerabilities, attack vectors, and fraud trends observed across the global payments network.
- Payment Intelligence Case Studies: Provides in-depth analyses of emerging fraud schemes, enabling fraud and cybersecurity teams to benchmark against real-world incidents and improve internal strategies.
Together, these features empower organizations to move from a reactive posture — responding to fraud after it happens — to a proactive defense model that identifies and neutralizes threats before they can impact cardholders or businesses.
Building on Recorded Future’s Intelligence Legacy
The launch of Mastercard Threat Intelligence comes less than a year after Mastercard completed its acquisition of Recorded Future, one of the world’s most respected cyber intelligence firms. The partnership brings together Recorded Future’s machine learning–driven threat analysis with Mastercard’s vast global network and fraud detection systems.
This collaboration highlights Mastercard’s strategy of integrating cyber defense into every aspect of the payment ecosystem. By doing so, it creates a powerful model for intelligence-led security — one that enables the entire financial ecosystem to share insights, identify threat actors, and respond rapidly to new forms of attack.
According to Tracy (Kitten) Goldberg, Director of Cybersecurity at Javelin Strategy & Research, this kind of cross-sector data sharing will be vital in the years ahead.
Effective cybersecurity will increasingly depend on threat intelligence that crosses sectors and regions,” Goldberg explained. “Vendors with broad transactional data and analytics will play a key role in improving information-sharing among financial services, merchants, and across the industry.”
Goldberg further noted that Mastercard’s new offering represents an important step forward in what she describes as “cyber fusion” — the integration of fraud detection, identity verification, and cybersecurity into a unified threat management system.
Feeding threat intel across disparate teams and industries in meaningful ways helps fraud and cybersecurity professionals more readily identify trends,” she said. “This shift enables organizations to move from reactive response to proactive mitigation.”
Proven Impact Across Mastercard’s Ecosystem
Even before its public launch, Mastercard’s threat intelligence data has already demonstrated measurable success in combating large-scale payment fraud. During a six-month market testing phase, the system helped ecosystem partners identify and take down malicious domains linked to card data theft.
The results were striking — nearly 9,500 e-commerce sites had been compromised by these domains, collectively connected to an estimated $120 million in fraudulent activity. The ability to pinpoint and neutralize these attacks early illustrates the enormous potential of integrating cyber threat data directly into payment defense mechanisms.
Institutions that participated in the early rollout have already seen improvements in threat detection efficiency. Irvin Salinas Pineda, a fraud expert at Banco Mercantil del Norte, highlighted how the new platform is helping his institution keep pace with rapidly evolving threats.
Mastercard Threat Intelligence will help us keep pace with major threats and trends — something that was not always possible given the high demands of daily operations,” Pineda said.
From Cyber Risk to Strategic Advantage
The broader implication of Mastercard’s new offering extends beyond operational fraud prevention. By embedding cyber threat intelligence directly into the payments infrastructure, Mastercard is effectively transforming security into a strategic advantage for financial institutions and merchants alike.
In an era where data breaches and synthetic identity fraud continue to rise, real-time visibility into the threat landscape can inform not just defensive measures but also business and compliance decisions. Fraud prevention teams can align more closely with cybersecurity divisions, while executives gain clearer insights into risk exposure across channels and geographies.
Moreover, Mastercard Threat Intelligence aligns with the company’s broader commitment to securing the digital economy — an effort that includes innovations in digital identity verification, dispute management, and AI-powered fraud detection tools.
Availability and Demonstrations at Money20/20
Mastercard Threat Intelligence is now available globally for both issuers and acquirers, marking a major step forward in the company’s ongoing mission to safeguard the integrity of digital transactions.
Attendees at Money20/20 USA can experience the new solution firsthand at Mastercard’s booth (#13061) at the Venetian Convention & Expo Center. The booth features interactive demonstrations that showcase how Mastercard’s technology brings intelligence to life — from fraud prevention and identity management to dispute resolution and commercial growth solutions.
Visitors can also explore how Mastercard is leveraging its Agent Pay platform to make transactions smarter and more efficient, as well as learn about the company’s initiatives that help businesses digitize securely and expand their commercial footprint.
A Unified Front Against Global Payment Fraud
As cybercriminals become increasingly organized, scalable, and sophisticated, the payment industry faces mounting pressure to anticipate — not just react to — emerging threats. Mastercard’s introduction of its Threat Intelligence platform marks a critical evolution in how the financial ecosystem defends itself: through intelligence, collaboration, and shared visibility.
With a combination of Recorded Future’s analytical power, Mastercard’s fraud detection network, and global partnerships across the financial sector, the company is setting a new benchmark for how intelligence can be operationalized to protect every transaction — and every stakeholder — in the digital economy.
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