How Mastercard Stopped $13B in Fraud With Real-Time AI

Nirav Mehta (0:00)

The line between product and technology is becoming more and more fuzzy, right? You think about how companies are developing, you know, product organizations are becoming technology organizations. It's becoming much more gray.

Peter High (0:13)

Welcome to Technovation. I'm Peter High, president of Metis Strategy. My guest today is Nirav Mehta. Nirav is the chief technology officer of services at Mastercard. Mastercard is a global technology company that powers commerce in more than 200 countries and territories. The company generated nearly $33 billion in revenue in 2025

While Mastercard is best known for the card and a consumer's wallet, its role extends well beyond processing payments. The company provides services that help customers secure transactions, prevent fraud, personalize experiences, and turn data into actionable intelligence. Nirav leads the engineering and technology organization across the fastest growing part of the company, Mastercard Services. His responsibilities include data infrastructure, analytics platforms, core technology capabilities, and the team supporting the company's services products. Before joining Mastercard, Nirav was group chief technology officer and chief information officer for corporate engineering at the London Stock Exchange Group. He brings more than 25 years of technology experience across financial services, healthcare, education, media, and telecommunications. In this conversation, he and I will explore the parts of Mastercard that consumers may not see, including the services surrounding each transaction.

We'll discuss Mastercard's data commercialization platform, the principles and governance required to use data responsibly, and how artificial intelligence is helping the company turn data into intelligence and intelligence into action. Nirav, welcome to Technovation. It's great to see you today.

Nirav Mehta (1:41)

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Peter High (1:43)

Today's episode is brought to you by Tines 3B. Organizations are pushing teams to move faster with AI. That's creating a wave of AI-generated code and unsanctioned automations, leading to rising costs, security risks and huge IT burdens. Meet Tines 3B, a single, secure environment that enables employees to build with AI while giving IT and security complete control to run and govern that work.

3B enables effortless building. Describe what you need in plain English and 3B builds a fully functioning workflow. It uses IT authorized connectors, meaning credentials stay protected, and non-technical teams can innovate without taking on unseen risk.

Also, with full visibility across every workflow, IT gets total governance while features like AutoTune and AutoFix ensure workflows improve and self-heal continuously over time. Employees get the freedom to build while IT gets the control to govern.

No shadow AI, no data leaks. Tines 3B moves IT and security from blockers to enablers, giving teams the speed to innovate without compromising control. Visit the Tines website at tines.com. That's tines.com to learn more and try 3B for yourself. And now on to the interview. Likewise. Well, I don't think your company Mastercard needs all that much of an introduction, but maybe just because there's the aspect of the business that I think is most commonly understood and a lot of it that is not, maybe you can provide a little bit of an overview about Mastercard. And then I'd love to further get into Mastercard Services, the part of the organization where you spend most of your time. Provide a little bit of background if you would.

Nirav Mehta (3:15)

Sure. First of all, Peter, thank you again so much for the opportunity today. So everyone thinks of Mastercard traditionally as a payments company, but the way we think about our soft is we're really a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission statement is to really connect people, businesses, financial institutions, merchants, governments, to really drive commerce at scale. So we're really one of the payments network from that perspective. Beyond processing, we really help businesses and customers with complex business problems. One of the little secrets is we are one of the largest cybersecurity companies. So we do a lot of work around protecting transactions, providing cybersecurity solutions. We provide lots of insights and analytics to enable the commerce.

Now with the advent of agentic commerce, we're playing a huge role in agentic commerce, with enabling machine-to-machine payments, and also enabling other types of payments in the agentic space from that perspective. So that's a little bit just about us from a high level perspective.

I'll talk a little bit about my remit, Peter, if that's helpful.

Peter High (4:19)

Please do. Yeah, I'd love to have you talk about that. In the process, talk a bit more about the part of the organization that specifically you're a part of. But thank you for that overview.

Nirav Mehta (4:27)

Yeah. So if you think about Mastercard, we obviously operate the payment space from a technology perspective, but across the payments life cycle, we provide a variety of value-added services. I touched on earlier everything from cybersecurity solutions to personalization, e-commerce, marketing services.