---
title: "Mastercard: Context by Design"
url: "https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/mastercard-context-by-design/"
description: "Andrew Reiskind, CDO of Mastercard, explains why agentic commerce demands enable machine-readable context and how to get there."
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/

**Mastercard: Context by Design** - 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/mastercard-context-by-design/.

## 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

At Mastercard, trust has always been the product, but as AI agents begin transacting on our behalf, operating without perfect machine-readable context becomes a profound liability. Andrew shares how Mastercard is engineering context into the fabric of its data through "agentic governance" - ensuring that as commerce gets faster, it also becomes more trustworthy.

Key takeaways:

- Agentic commerce requires context designed for machines from the start, not translated from human tribal knowledge
- Trust at transaction speed demands machine-readable context about definitions, relationships, and business rules
- Agentic governance means building standards and guardrails that AI agents follow automatically without human intervention
- Mastercard's evolution: from privacy by design to data by design to context by design over six years
- Responsible AI innovation requires context infrastructure that scales at the speed of automated commerce

## More from Re:Govern 2025

- [CME Group: Context at Speed](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/cme-group-context-at-speed/) (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)
- [How Mastercard Designs Context at Scale](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/how-mastercard-designs-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/