Mastercard Buying Recorded Future for $2.65 Billion

Mastercard is acquiring threat intelligence provider Recorded Future from Insight Partners for $2.65 billion.

The payment card giant is expanding its cybersecurity services with the acquisition. Recorded Future has more than 1,900 clients across 75 countries, including the governments of 45 countries and over 50% of the Fortune 100. Its partners include VARs, MSSPs, OEMs and more.

Insight Partners, a global software investor, acquired Recorded Future in 2019 for more than $780 million.

The acquisition should close by the first quarter of 2025 subject to regulatory review and other customary closing conditions.

Mastercard's Johan Gerber

“Our identity, fraud prevention and cybersecurity services, combined with Recorded Future’s ability to gather high-value threat intelligence data, will strengthen our efforts to protect trust in the digital economy, as well as enhance the products and services we provide to customers globally — in the payments ecosystem and beyond,” Johan Gerber, Mastercard’s executive vice president of security and cyber innovation, told Channel Futures.

What Mastercard Gets with Recorded Future

Recorded Future will add to Mastercard’s identity, fraud prevention, real-time decisioning and cybersecurity services. That will bring expanded threat intelligence capabilities to Mastercard's network of merchants and financial institutions.

Both Mastercard and Recorded Future use AI to analyze billions of data points to identify potential threats. Mastercard said the combination will allow the development of “even more robust practices, and drive greater synergies in cybersecurity and intelligence.”

In a LinkedIn post, Christopher Ahlberg, Recorded Future’s CEO, said the end result of the acquisition will be “same company, new owner, massive scale.

“Recorded Future will continue to generate intelligence at global scale, using the most advanced AI tools and methods to turn it into gold, allowing our analysts and customers to mitigate risk and protect their organizations,” he said. “We will remain an independent and open intelligence platform, operating as an independent subsidiary of Mastercard.”

Recorded Future and Mastercard already collaborate on an AI-supported service that alerts financial institutions when a card may have been compromised. The service has doubled the rate in which compromised cards are identified.