Ajay Bhalla is president of cyber and intelligence solutions for Mastercard. His mission for the last four years has been almost inconceivable, to guarantee the security of more than 70bn transactions processed every day. He leads the team that develops product solutions to ensure the safety, security and experience of Mastercard products and solutions for consumers, merchants, partners and governments around the world. Ajay also serves on the company's management committee.
Technology built by Bhalla's team can actually predict when fraudsters may try to steal credit card details and alert the bank in advance so that transactions can be blocked. He told The Daily Telegraph, “We are getting into predicting what card number could get compromised in future. We have solutions for early detection now which advise a bank in advance, saying that we believe based on the statistics, and data that these cards are going to present a problem. It's being used by banks globally.”
Though the company's objective is to build an impermeable system for the hackers, it has necessarily not always worked. But Mastercard's drive to stop hackers with predictive technology is gaining momentum. His team is also planning to release a technology to check identitities faster and stop false credit card declines- a huge problem that the financial service sector faces, the daily reported.
Ajay is pinning his hopes on Mastercard's biometric technology, which will be used by millions of people from April 2019, as banks plan to roll out payments online and in store that can be approved by customers' fingerprints or pictures of their faces, rather than a just pin number or password verifications.
Prior to his current role, Ajay was the president of the Digital Payment Services business for Mastercard. He led the development and growth of the business in e-commerce and innovative payments processing establishing Mastercard as a pioneer and leader in many markets in this space.
Ajay has also been president of Mastercard for South Asia and Southeast Asia, where he led the business in 18 markets. During his tenure, Mastercard became a market leader in many markets/segments and grew the business multifold launching several innovative payments solutions.
Before joining Mastercard, Ajay held key leadership positions at HSBC and Xerox.
