Mastercard is betting that its new foundational AI model, trained on billions of anonymised transactions, will help improve everything from its cyber defences to loyalty programmes.

Unlike the popular large language models trained on huge amounts of unstructured data, Mastercard, working with Nvidia and Databricks, has built a large tabular model, or LTM, which is trained on structured data, such as large-scale tables or datasets.

The LTM is trained on billions of anonymised transactions, with Mastercard planning to ramp this up to include hundreds of billions of payments transactions, as well as additional types of datasets, including merchant location data, fraud data, authorisation data, chargeback data and loyalty programme data.

The partner of Fintech section is