Challenge
Mastercard is embracing the future of payments with a strategy summarized as a World Beyond Cash®: battling for share in the established markets they are in, while seizing enormous untapped opportunities globally for the 75% of consumers currently without credit cards. A secure network is needed to capture that potential, and it is being challenged daily by a quarter of a million attempted cyberattacks.
Solution
For 50 years, Mastercard has been putting technology first to make payments safer, simpler and smarter. Addressing the threat of cyber attacks with same priority, Mastercard’s experts are borrowing from their military experience to deploy proven solutions to monitor, share, and respond to critical incidents. It is there they originally discovered Activu, which is the solution chosen for Mastercard’s global fusion centers. Around the world, and around the clock, Activu’s software-based solution monitors critical operations, connecting the right teams and subject matter experts in the fusion center and other locations to improve incident response and decision making.
Result
The initial Fusion Center was built to make the high stakes work of this new discipline within Mastercard more tangible. Its operations team, security staff, and executives can now see — in real time, and with proper context — the 250,000 cyber attacks being addressed daily. And since their mission is global, so too is the system. From its original installation in North America, Activu is expanding to additional centers in other key locations around the world, and being fully integrated with the data science team’s key metrics so they can separate signal from noise and have the right experts instantly and automatically engaged to solve the most genuine threats.