NOMINATION HIGHLIGHTS

The payment fraud landscape has fundamentally shifted, driving constant innovation to stay ahead of evolving threats. From chip cards that encrypt transaction data to tokens with randomly generated numbers designed for a single transaction, we’ve made significant progress in reducing loss and counterfeit fraud – yet criminals today operate with unprecedented speed and sophistication. Last year, threat actors posted 142 million stolen cards and 1.3 million checks for sale or freely on criminal forums (Recorded Future, Payment Fraud Intelligence, 2025). These are cyber events that lead to financial fraud, and businesses will eventually be exposed if their security and fraud teams aren’t connected.

Mastercard Threat Intelligence is the first-ever threat intelligence solution applied to payments at scale. As payment fraud grows, it’s no longer just an issue for fraud teams — 60% of global fraud leaders report that they’re notified of cyber breaches after fraud losses begin — it’s an escalating cybersecurity challenge that businesses struggle to detect and defend against (Datos Insights, 2025). When fraud and security teams operate in silos, they miss the early warning signs of fraud, leading to downstream losses that can impact an organization’s bottom line and reputation.

Mastercard Threat Intelligence solves this by combining Mastercard’s fraud insights —drawn from billions of data points — and global network visibility with Recorded Future’s cyber threat intelligence, enabling cybersecurity and fraud teams to reduce risk and enhance operational resilience. Information becomes actionable insight — a merchant anomaly is now a warning, patterns are spotted sooner and responses happen faster.

The platform offers five key functionalities: card testing, digital skimming intelligence, merchant threat intelligence, payment ecosystem threat intelligence and payment intelligence reports to help payment fraud and merchant compliance teams to proactively detect, prevent and respond to cyber-enabled fraud.

By integrating threat intelligence into payment ecosystems, Mastercard Threat Intelligence empowers teams to work together to identify and neutralize early-stage attacks, implement precise, code-level defenses and dramatically improve threat detection.

Threat intelligence data has helped Mastercard’s ecosystem partners identify and take down numerous malicious domains that were responsible for the theft of payment card data. These domains impacted nearly 10,500+ ecommerce sites and were linked to an estimated $141 million in fraud.

Mastercard Threat Intelligence’s unique combination of threat intelligence insights from every corner of the internet and real-time global transaction data enables transparency and collaboration across financial institutions, reducing losses and strengthening trust across the global payments network.