How Mastercard is using AI to address cyber risk

As with just about every industry, AI has increasingly infiltrated the financial sector -- from visual AI tools that monitor customers and workers to automating the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) application process. Talking at VentureBeat's Transform 2021 event today, Johan Gerber, executive VP for security and cyber innovation at Mastercard, discussed how Mastercard is using AI to better understand and adapt to cyber risk, while keeping people's data safe. On the one hand, consumers have never had it so easy -- making payments is as frictionless as it has ever been. Ride-hail passengers can exit their cab without wasting precious minutes finalizing the transaction with the driver, while home-workers can configure their printer to automatically reorder ink when it runs empty. "As easy as it is for the consumer, the complexity lies in the background -- we have seen the evolution of this hyper connected world in the backend just explode," Gerber said.