Trust is a crucial factor in the digital world. How do you believe trust can be built and maintained between parties in an increasingly digital environment?
In our increasingly digital world, trust has become an invaluable commodity. It enables the connections that power our businesses, and it is the glue that binds us to our customers. The recent incredible growth of ecommerce has had a profound impact on the way we live and work and has ushered in a new era of choice and convenience that we couldn’t have imagined a few decades ago. Yet it has also brought with it challenges in building and maintaining trust.
When we shop at a local store, trust between the customer and the retailer can be easily established. Imagine your neighbourhood market, where you go every week and do not need to reintroduce yourself; this familiarity creates trust. However, not only is it more difficult to prove our identities online, but ecommerce is also increasingly complex and critical for retailers as people conduct more of their day-to-day lives online. In the digital realm, the ability to prove that you are who you say you are is the foundation of trust.
Embracing new technologies that draw on physical biometrics and behavioural traits can be key to providing the experience consumers want and are accustomed to. Just think about how often you may use biometrics yourself – to unlock your phone, make a payment, open an app, or enter a building.
While Mastercard’s new technologies include biometric checkout that allows consumers to pay simply by smiling or waving in-store, in the ecommerce realm, we have also developed tools that can help authenticate a genuine consumer by how they hold their phone or the speed of their typing or swiping. Mastercard has created and continues to refine, a multi-layered approach to security, and through the effective combination of technologies such as AI and machine learning, we can tell if someone is who they say they are in the digital world.
Protecting the digital ecosystem goes beyond just payments. In your opinion, what are the most important aspects that we should consider when safeguarding all our digital interactions?
Two thirds of the worlds’ population – 5 billion of us – are connected via digital networks, influencing how we shop, work, live and play. Yet this era of hyperconnectivity brings with it risk as well as opportunity.
It is now estimated that cybercrime will cost the global economy over $13 trillion by 2028. This will continue to challenge us in new ways, urging governments, businesses and civil society to step up and sharpen cyber defences. In my role it motivates me to push for faster, smarter innovation – to defend the digital ecosystem.
To enhance cyber resiliency, firstly, we need policymakers and companies to work together to harness the potential of technology, to drive standards and deliver protection for businesses and consumers alike. At Mastercard, we play a leading role here: our AI-powered solutions like SafetyNet have saved $35bn across our network in the past three years alone.
Secondly, organisations must continue to scan their networks for risks and the detection of cyber vulnerabilities. Prevention of cyber-attacks is key. Covering 14 million entities we are already one of the world’s largest cyber assessment providers.
And thirdly, we need to constantly adapt and advance to stay ahead; at Mastercard we have invested over $1bn in expanding our cyber capabilities, enabling us to simplify the link between convenience and security by harnessing best-in-class technology.
Of course, while we make the ecosystem safer, more secure and seamless we also need to ensure it is inclusive. By collaborating across industries and sharing intelligence, we are working to bring an additional one billion people into the digital economy.
Emerging technologies like AI have the potential to transform the consumer experience of payments. How do you envision these technologies enhancing our lifestyles and the way we conduct transactions?
I’m incredibly excited about the burst of activity that’s unfolding around generative AI. We’ve been harnessing the power of AI in some way shape or form for over a decade, and it has been a game changer for helping us spot and identify patterns in fraud. But this next phase of generative AI is going to enable us to provide even better outcomes for people and businesses.
Already from Mastercard’s perspective I can see clear benefits, such as: enhanced risk modelling and resiliency; improved account opening and verification processes; and greater levels of personalisation we can offer cardholders.
However, across the world there’s huge potential for new use cases of generative AI. From healthcare, where AI can improve our quality of life by enhancing medical diagnosis and treatment, to its use in agriculture to produce higher crop yields. The list of potential use cases is endless.
With the rise of new technologies like AI and Quantum, there’s also a concern about cyber criminals exploiting them. How can we mitigate the risks and protect ourselves from these potential threats?
On the flipside of the positive outcomes that new technologies can deliver are the bad actors who also have access and are already trying to ‘weaponise’ them. The sophistication of cyber-attacks using emerging technologies from AI to quantum computing are only going to increase, and the threat is real.
We are already seeing evidence of fraudsters using deepfake AI in impersonation scams, and criminals are using machine learning to relentlessly test for vulnerabilities in organisations’ cybersecurity. And as quantum computing develops, attempts to break security cryptography will become the target.
A study last month found half of all internet traffic is now coming from bots, attacking API endpoints and websites, enabled by more powerful computing and processing capabilities. Across the world, these bots drove DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks up by 22 percent in 2022. So, the onus is very much on us to use the emerging technologies for good, and our collective defence.
Digital identity solutions have the potential to enhance security and improve the overall digital experience. Can you explain how these solutions can achieve both objectives?
Identity fraud is a huge global problem – in 2022, organisations worldwide experienced $43bn in identity fraud losses. But too often, when proving identity, people are asked to choose between convenience and security – think of the countless hours most of us have spent answering security questions, providing pins and one-time passwords. I saw a recent poll where half of respondents said it would take just one bad experience online to make them switch to
a competitor. But why should we have to compromise?
Our capabilities span the entire consumer lifecycle, from initial account opening, through account changes and across any transaction or interaction, whilst ensuring the privacy of people’s data. For example, through advanced artificial intelligence and behavioural biometrics, we can distinguish a genuine consumer from a fraudster by the way they type or hold their device.
By analysing data in real-time, such as erratic or exaggerated spending patterns or the opening of multiple accounts, and then combining this with key identity markers, we build the picture of whether a transaction is being made by a genuine person or a fraudster. Digital identity services have the power to unlock the potential for key technologies like biometrics in all digital interactions – transforming how people access key services and well beyond payments.
Sustainability is an important aspect of product and solution design, both in the physical and digital domains. How do you believe we can integrate sustainability into the design process to create more environmentally friendly products and solutions?
Today, Mastercard is a very different company from the one which was founded in 1966, but one element has largely remained the same — the plastic payment card itself. It’s estimated that 25 billion cards are currently in circulation across the world, and the overwhelming majority of them are made from first-use plastics, like PVC, that will not break down or decompose.
So we decided to do something about it. Over the past five years, through our Sustainable Cards Program, we have led real change and encouraged over 420 banks across 93 countries to work in partnership with major card manufacturers, and transition more than 260 million cards to recycled and bio-based materials.
And earlier this year we went further – while complementing our digital efforts which over time will ultimately remove the need for a physical card offering – we announced that by 2028 all newly issued plastic cards on our network will need to be made from sustainable materials.
Tackling the greatest sustainability challenges can’t be done alone – it will take partnerships, and we can make our biggest impact by activating our global network to create collective action.
Indeed, we are also working with our partner banks to help securely recycle the huge number of legacy first use PVC cards, so they can be re-formed to other plastic goods, and not end up in landfill. Across our business, we’ve taken a hard look at how we can reduce our own footprint and activate our network to help combat climate change.
From restoring 100 million trees through our Priceless Planet Coalition to enabling cardholders to make more informed spending decisions using our Carbon Calculator, we are actively building sustainable features into our products and solutions.
Mastercard has been at the forefront of innovation in the payment industry. Can you share some examples of how Mastercard has embraced emerging technologies to enhance security and improve the consumer experience?
Leveraging technology to improve the security and experience of any payment goes to the heart of our reason for being, and I could probably fill this entire interview with examples. Use cases which we now take for granted include how we integrated contactless into cards and electronic devices or how we now use biometrics to authenticate a payment – none of us would want to go back to PINs and passwords for every interaction.
One latest example I’m really proud of is where we are using AI to defeat scams. From romance scams to online marketplace fraud, scams of all kinds have plagued people all over the world in recent years, costing them billions of dollars, and banks have found them incredibly challenging to detect.
They have struggled as their scammed customers pass all the required safety checks and unknowingly send the money to fraudsters themselves direct from their bank account; criminals haven’t needed to break any security measures. However, we are using our latest AI capabilities to fight back, starting in the UK, we’re working with nine banks to identify and predict which payments are being made to fraudsters and stop them in real-time, before any funds leave an account.
Learning from ‘Decision Intelligence’, our real time fraud score for card payments, our ‘Consumer Fraud Risk’ solution provides an instant risk score (within milliseconds) to banks based on several factors. For example, perhaps the recipient account has previously had fraudulent funds flow into it, or it’s known to have transferred funds into accounts that have been part of a network of fraudulent ‘mule’ accounts.
Ultimately, our AI comes into effect when looking at our network view and the broader relationship of the bank accounts in question. Its early days but the initial results have been extraordinary. TSB, the first bank to adopt our solution, say in just 4 months it has dramatically increased its fraud detection and should their performance be mirrored across all UK banks, they’d collectively stop £100m ($131m) more fraud each year.
This success means we are already assessing the next markets to release the technology in.