Mastercard Opens Center to Combat Cybercrime in Europe

Mastercard has unveiled a center in Europe aimed at tackling cyber crime in the region.

The Europe Cyber Resilience Center (ECRC), announced Thursday (May 30), is designed to improve defenses against cyber-threats and act as a hub for “thought leadership in cybersecurity.”

“In today’s hyperconnected world, cybercrime is evolving and so are we,” said Michael Miebach, CEO of Mastercard. “This center will bring together the brightest minds from business, government and other sectors to stay ahead of threats and make the digital world as secure as possible. After all, the work to ensure people can trust that they are safe online doesn’t stop at our four walls — or our firewalls.”

To push back against these threats, the ECRC will work with partners from across the public and private sectors, including national cyber intelligence centers, law enforcement agencies and industry bodies across Europe.

The ECRC includes a fusion center, which the company calls “the heart of Mastercard’s organizational incident response,” as well as a digital forensics lab and representatives from more than 20 teams.

The announcement follows last week’s news that Mastercard had begun using generative AI to more quickly identify compromised credit cards.

“Until now fraudsters may have thought they were operating in obscurity, seeking to launder the card details of millions of unsuspecting victims,” Johan Gerber, Mastercard’s executive vice president for security and cyber innovation, said at the time. “Thanks to our world-leading cyber technology we can now piece together the jigsaw — enhancing trust to banks, their customers and the digital ecosystem as a whole.”

The new technology scans transaction data across billions of cards and millions of merchants faster than “previously imaginable, as Mastercard put it, informing the company about new and complex fraud patterns, using generative AI-based predictive technology to guard future transactions against emerging threats.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about the growing fraud threat facing smaller merchants in a conversation with Visa Senior Vice President and Global Head of Risk and Identity Solutions James Mirfin and Jotform Head of Information Security Johannes Wiklund.

“As a small business owner, you don’t get up in the morning thinking about fraud and the bad guys — and how they are coming after you,” Mirfin told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.

Small businesses are especially vulnerable to attacks, Mirfin and Wiklund said, noting that online forms used by customers can also be exploited by fraudsters, who are adept at populating those forms with things like stolen card credentials and synthetic identities.