---
title: "How Mastercard designs context at scale"
url: "https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/how-mastercard-designs-context/"
description: "Andrew Reiskind, CDO of Mastercard, explains how 17 years of tribal knowledge about cryptic transaction codes needs to become embedded context - because AI can't read minds."
keywords: "atlan, data governance, regovern 2025, regovern watch center"
---

> Atlan is hosting Context Conference, bringing together the leaders and builders at the frontier of giving AI the context it needs to understand their business. It runs online on October 28, 2026, from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM ET. Atlan co-founder Prukalpa Sankar opens and closes the day. Leaders from AstraZeneca, BNY and Verizon share why they invest in context and what they get from it. Registrants get early access to The AI Context Gap, a new study from MIT Technology Review Insights. Register: https://atlan.com/context-conference/

**How Mastercard Designs Context at Scale** - a Re:Govern 2025 recording on the Atlan Re:Govern watch center, with Andrew Reiskind, Chief Data Officer (Mastercard). The recording plays for about 2 minutes, then the page asks for an email to keep watching. Watch it at https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/how-mastercard-designs-context/.

## Speaker

- **Andrew Reiskind**, Chief Data Officer, Mastercard. Andrew spent 16+ years embedding privacy by design at Mastercard. Now he secures 160B+ AI-scanned transactions annually, proving governance accelerates innovation. He's building "Context by Design" for agentic commerce at Mastercard.

## Company: Mastercard

Mastercard processes billions of transactions globally, with AI now powering 1/3 of its products. 160B+ transactions scanned annually by AI-driven fraud detection. 2,000+ specialists advance data & AI innovation under Data Responsibility Principles.

## What's inside

Tribal knowledge doesn't scale in the AI era. When AI needs to interpret transactions at the speed they occur, context can't live in people's heads - it must be embedded directly into the data itself, turning implicit knowledge into explicit, machine-readable meaning.

Key takeaways:

- Tribal knowledge about data quirks and processing rules creates a bottleneck when AI needs instant context
- Contextual information must be embedded into transactional data, not stored separately or in documentation
- Even simple business terms like "fraud" often have multiple valid definitions that require explicit documentation
- Mastercard evolved from privacy by design to data by design to context by design over six years
- AI governance frameworks must include clear context and data definitions before building any model

## More from Re:Govern 2025

- [CME Group: Context at Speed](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/cme-group-context-at-speed/) (Session Recordings)
- [Mastercard: Context by Design](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/mastercard-context-by-design/) (Session Recordings)
- [Workday: Context as Culture](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-context-as-culture/) (Session Recordings)
- [Why Workday is Building a Semantic Layer](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-building-semantic-layer/) (Highlights)
- [Workday's Learnings From its First Talk to Data experiment](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-talk-to-data-learnings/) (Highlights)
- [How Workday Connects Context Across Business Tools](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/how-workday-connects-context/) (Highlights)
- [Mastercard's Federated Architecture for Agentic Commerce](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/mastercard-federated-architecture/) (Highlights)
- [How Protocols and Tools are Evolving for Agentic Governance](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/protocols-agentic-governance/) (Highlights)
- [How Data Roles are Evolving: From Modelers to Context Engineers](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/data-modelers-to-context-engineers/) (Highlights)
- [The Evolution of Trust: Building the Foundations for Future-Readiness](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/evolution-of-trust/) (Session Recordings)
- [How Mercury Insurance is creating PII-free workspaces for AI use cases](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/pii-free-workspaces/) (Highlights)
- [GitLab's Strategies for Building Reliable Conversational Analytics](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/gitlab-conversational-analytics-strategies/) (Highlights)
- [AI-Ready Tech Pioneers Share their Single Most Effective AI Readiness Strategies](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/ai-readiness-strategies-pioneers/) (Highlights)
- [GitLab's Learnings from its First Experiment with Conversational AI](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/gitlab-conversational-ai-learnings/) (Highlights)
- [Vimeo's Approach to Data Governance in the Era of Conversational Analytics](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/Vimeo-approach-to-data-governance/) (Highlights)
- [Inside General Motors Metadata Lakehouse](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/gm-metadata-lakehouse/) (Highlights)
- [Workday's Semantic Layer Strategy](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-semantic-layer-strategy/) (Highlights)
- [Modern Data & AI Governance Blueprint](https://atlan.com/blueprint) (Resources)

Back to the watch center: https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/