Mastercard & Entrust Unite to Tackle Growing Identity Fraud
Entrust and Mastercard have expanded their corporate partnership with the aim of enhancing the latter's fraud prevention and detection capabilities.
The collaboration will see the integration of Mastercard's Identity insights into the Entrust Identity Verification Security Platform, all of which should give Mastercard users a new level of security.
The announcement, made at Mastercard's RiskX event this month, aims to address the growing challenges of identity fraud while streamlining digital onboarding processes for businesses.
A new level of security
Dennis Gamiello, Executive Vice President and Global Head of Identity at Mastercard says: "By combining Mastercard Identity's insights with the Entrust Identity Security Platform, we're helping enterprises move beyond reactive fraud detection.
"This partnership expansion enables a proactive, personalised approach that strengthens security while keeping the user experience seamless."
The integration allows organisations to reduce manual intervention costs while maintaining robust security measures.
This comes at a crucial time, as identity theft cases continue to rise, with 748,555 cases reported in the US during the first half of 2025, marking an increase of over 196,000 from the previous year.
Striking a balance between security and user experience
According to Entrust's Future of Global Identity Verification report, 66% of organisations are struggling to balance customer experience with identity fraud prevention.
The enhanced partnership addresses this challenge by combining Mastercard's intelligent pre-screening capabilities with automated remote onboarding features.
Minh Nguyen, Vice President of Product and Identity Verification at Entrust, explains: "As identity fraud is on the rise, along with high costs and rising customer expectations, collaboration is crucial.
"Organisations have to adapt faster than ever, and this partnership helps ensure that they can leverage Mastercard's insights through our platform to stay ahead of emerging threats.
"Together, we're helping businesses combat fraud, reduce manual reviews and onboard more customers with confidence – delivering both stronger protection and measurable business results."
A different approach to risk assessment
The platform's risk assessment process begins during onboarding, where personal information is analysed against Mastercard's Identity network to generate a risk score.
This scoring system pulls from multiple authoritative sources and applies machine learning to detect unusual behaviour patterns.
The system implements a risk-based approach, where users are directed to appropriate onboarding paths based on their risk level.
Low-risk users should experience minimal friction, while high-risk cases require additional verification steps, including document or biometric verification.
Organisations can customise their verification workflows according to their specific needs, allowing for flexible risk management strategies.
One buy-now-pay-later service has reported a 60% increase in passive identity verification using Mastercard's signals.
The UK financial sector faces annual fraud losses of £1.8bn, highlighting the critical need for enhanced security measures.
In response, Mastercard has also formed partnerships with Monzo, Natwest and Santander to strengthen fraud prevention in Account 2 Account payments through AI-powered transaction scoring.
