Located in England, the MasterCard DigiSec Lab is focused on proactively testing threats to all forms of digital payments in coordination with government security agencies and leading academics.

“The MasterCard DigiSec Lab represents our collective efforts to maximize product innovation and security investments,” said Ajay Bhalla, president of Enterprise Security Solutions at MasterCard. “While payments have never been safer, criminals have never been smarter. We’ve now opened the lab to our customers as part of an ongoing commitment to share insights, solutions and best practices to deliver the highest levels of security.”

Whether testing the latest in EMV chip cards, mobile payments or biometric authentication, the MasterCard DigiSec Lab team deconstructs the technology to identify opportunities to strengthen it and continue to protect consumers, merchants and financial institutions from fraud.

Every day, they are tasked with uncovering potential threats and problems most people don’t even know exist. To aid in these efforts, the team fires lasers at payment cards, normally used in deep astronomy, and uses X-ray machines to analyze gadgets used by hackers, in addition to other activities.

The increased pace of technological change, along with the digital profile of today’s connected consumer, has created the need for greater collaboration and knowledge sharing. The broadened mandate of the lab will help jointly problem solve for fraud and risk by activating its tools, unique broad network view and technical know-how.

The MasterCard DigiSec Lab works in close partnership with other groups – including Information Security, Emerging Payments and MasterCard Labs – to deliver a multi-layered approach to address security risks and concerns wherever they may arise.