Mastercard Enhances Real-Time Threat Visibility With Recorded Future Purchase

Looking to expand security and threat intelligence beyond a completed transaction, Mastercard on Thursday (Sept. 12) announced it is acquiring Recorded Future for $2.7 billion.

At a high level, Recorded Future analyzes a broad set of data sources to provide visibility into potential threats to help customers take action to prevent risks and create models that anticipate new attacks. The company boasts a roster of 1,900 clients internationally across 75 countries, including 45 governments, and counts more than half of the Fortune 500 companies as clients.

“No one wakes up in the morning and says: ‘Today, I’m going to use my payment card,’” Johan Gerber, executive vice president of security solutions at Mastercard, told PYMNTS after the announcement. “If you think about our hyperconnected and interdependent digital world … almost every day that goes by sees the expansion of the digital footprint. You wake up and you get a coffee, maybe you fill up your car — or you read something online, and your payment is integrated into the digital experience.”

That expansion has given rise to a continuum of activities that create commerce ecosystems, tied to ubiquitous mobile devices where payments are in the background. That means the fraud and attack vectors are also expanding. Fraudsters are swarming everything from account openings to how and when consumers use apps, and where their credentials are stored.

Along the way, Gerber said, the lines between cybercrime and fraud are collapsing, as stolen credentials are harvested when a website is breached. The stolen credentials are used for scams and social engineering, and card and other types of fraud are rampant.

According to Gerber, the key to safeguarding trust in the future of the rapidly expanding digital environment lies in thinking about security and real-time visibility into the digital economy well beyond the payment itself.

Gerber said one of the attractions of the acquisition is the insight into consumer behaviors and potential threats that Recorded Future will bring.

“By the time you get to the payment, you’re almost at the last part of that digital interaction you’re having as a consumer,” Gerber said. “So for us to go beyond the payment really means in this specific instance, how do we look broadly across the entire digital interaction rather than specifically the payment. Now, if you think about the services that Mastercard offers today, we often talk about things that we do before the transaction, like account opening, biometrics authentication and so forth.”

“We will continue to operate as the same company, but now with a new owner and an even greater capacity to scale,” said Recorded Future CEO Christopher Ahlberg in a blog post. “As an independent subsidiary of Mastercard, we will leverage advanced AI tools and techniques to deliver threat intelligence on a global scale, empowering our analysts and clients to better protect their organizations.”

The payments network has made billions of dollars worth of acquisitions through the years.

Within the security solutions segment of Mastercard, key focal points center on examining and protecting digital identities, protecting transactions and using insights from 143 billion annual payments to fashion real-time intelligence that can be used by merchants and FIs to anticipate new threats.

By way of example, the firm acquired Ekarta in 2021 to score transactions for the likelihood of fraud through robust identity verification. All told, Mastercard has invested more than $7 billion over the past five years in its efforts to protect the digital economy.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a key ingredient here, and Gerber detailed to PYMNTS that the company has been a pioneer in harnessing generative AI to extract trends from huge swaths of data to create “identity graphs” that provide immediate value to any merchant or FI that wants to understand more about the individuals that’s interacting with them in the digital realm.

The use of other “intelligence graphs” connects the dots across data points to turn threat-related data into actionable insights.

“We already see a tremendous number of attacks and different attack vectors that we can combine with what Recorded Future sees, which means the inputs can help Mastercard clients, including governments, insurance companies, manufacturers” and critical infrastructure providers, Gerber said.

The new acquisition, he said, will complement and strengthen Mastercard’s efforts to combat card-related fraud, scams and account-to-account fraud across the globe.

“This is a real investment in safeguarding trust,” he told PYMNTS, “so that consumers can go about their business with ease … the digital ecosystem just continues to grow, and so this will be a very important part of the defenses that we have in place to secure the future.”