Mastercard Bolsters Cybersecurity With Baffin Bay Purchase

Mastercard has acquired security firm Baffin Bay Networks to help its business clients fend off cyberattacks.

Based in Sweden, Baffin Bay “adds to Mastercard’s multi-layered approach to cybersecurity and helps to stop attacks, while mitigating exposure to risk across the ecosystem,” the payments giant said in a Monday (Mar. 20) news release.

The company says its purchase is in response to an uptick in cyberattacks on businesses, and will help Mastercard integrate its solutions into one cyber service. The company already offers data analytics through its RiskRecon tool.

With Baffin Bay — a cloud-based solution employing artificial intelligence (AI) technology — customers will get an automated threat protection to prevent attackers from breaking into or shutting down their systems, Mastercard said.

“Our cloud-based Threat Protection service provides a simple and effective way to safeguard against application and network-level attacks,” Joakim Sundberg, Baffin Bay’s founder and chief technology officer, said in the release. “Our two companies share this vision: to provide our customers with security and trust.”

Mastercard’s acquisition of Baffin Bay is happening at a time when businesses and governments are stepping up their efforts to fight fraud and other cyberattacks.

Recent research by PYMNTS — as noted in the 2023 “B2B Payments Fraud Tracker” — shows that more than 70% of businesses say they need additional digital fraud solutions in order to stay alert as fraudsters and scammers increasingly seek out cracks in their organizations.

Earlier this month, the White House announced a sweeping anti-fraud effort, stressing that in the wake of the pandemic, “reliance on historic knowledge-based verification is more and more susceptible to attacks given the widespread ease of access by criminal syndicates to individuals’ personal information.”

The Biden administration has set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to “support the modernization” of its verification and anti-fraud systems and protect the American public, while the PYMNTS report, “The State Of Fraud and Financial Crime In The U.S.,” show that smart businesses are doing the same with their internal systems.

Large financial institutions with more than $5 billion in assets together bore nearly $120 million in average fraud costs last year.

According to the report, digital payments misuse made up a little more than a fifth of the total number of fraudulent transactions, while fraud stemming from relationship, product and service scams together accounted for 22%.

Gerhard Oosthuizen, chief technology officer of Entersekt, told PYMNTS in an interview last month that “2023 is shaping up to be an interesting year, as businesses are now able to take stock of what tasks and which system investments are needed to accelerate success within tomorrow’s increasingly online and digital environment.”