Mastercard enhances its solutions using AI technology

With the relentless demand on banks to maintain consumer trust in an ever-evolving payments landscape, Mastercard has launched a new suite of enhanced solutions using AI to help them make good on the promise of ‘always-on’ payments.

With millions of transactions taking place every day, any disruption to the processing of card payments by banks – even for a matter of minutes – has the potential to cause massive disruption, jeopardizing consumer trust and confidence.

“In today’s world where the payment ecosystem is highly distributed and increasingly complex, it’s vital banks get the support they need to ensure card payments run seamlessly,” said Ajay Bhalla, President of Cyber and Intelligence at Mastercard.

A rise in cybersecurity threats, an expanding and diversifying payments ecosystem, and greater regulatory requirements are collectively giving rise to a need for enhanced resiliency.

To help banks address these challenges, Mastercard has expanded its Payment Resiliency solutions with three new optional enhancements to its Stand-In Authorization service:

• Dynamic decisioning – improving authorization accuracy by leveraging AI to make intelligent decisions on the issuers’ behalf.
• Account balance listing – giving issuers the ability to share cardholder spend limits with Mastercard to allow for more precise decisioning while mitigating overdraft and over-credit-limit concerns.
• Contingency manager – allowing issuers to create more flexible sets of customized Stand-In parameters which can be enabled automatically based on predefined conditions. In markets where this feature is not currently available, further information will be provided at the time of launch.

Mastercard’s resiliency solution helps mitigate the impact on consumers when banks are unable to process a card payment, whether due to planned or unexpected outages.

The impact of outages is prompting increased scrutiny from regulators who are interested in how financial institutions are building resiliency into their payment systems.

“With an increased focus on resiliency we are harnessing the latest AI technology to advance our solutions and make it even easier to ‘stand in’ for our customers to keep payments flowing. This improves consumer experience and protects trust across the ecosystem”, said Bhalla.