--- title: "What Forced Mastercard to Modernize Its Context Stack" url: "https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/mastercard-context-stack-modernization/" description: "A Re:Govern 2025 session recording in which Mastercard's Vivek Radhakrishnan and Fabien Thiaucourt explain how AI, cloud migration, and data growth pushed Mastercard to modernize its data governance." --- > 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/ **What Forced Mastercard to Modernize Its Context Stack** - a Re:Govern 2025 recording on the Atlan Re:Govern watch center, with Vivek Radhakrishnan, SVP, Data Governance Engineering; Fabien Thiaucourt, SVP, Data Governance & Enablement (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-stack-modernization/. ## Speakers - **Vivek Radhakrishnan**, SVP, Data Governance Engineering, Mastercard. Vivek leads data governance engineering at Mastercard, designing systems for scale and reliability across the company's global data ecosystem. He ensures context is embedded into every data product, powering AI use cases from text-to-SQL to conversational analytics while supporting billions of transactions. - **Fabien Thiaucourt**, SVP, Data Governance & Enablement, Mastercard. Fabien helps people find, trust, and use data responsibly at global scale at Mastercard. He leads platform product, governance cataloging, and enablement functions - transforming governance from compliance into business enablement for AI-ready data products. ## 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 Mastercard's governance worked fine when it was just about compliance in on-premise systems. But three forces converged to break that model: AI teams demanding context for LLMs, cloud platforms requiring governance across varied environments, and data volumes growing faster than manual processes could handle while businesses still demanded same-day insights. Key takeaways: - AI adoption exposed governance gaps - LLMs need rich context that compliance-focused systems weren't built to provide - Cloud migration forced governance to scale across multiple environments instead of one controlled system - Data volume growth outpaced manual governance, requiring automated controls like real-time lineage - Fragmented practices without global oversight made it impossible to concentrate efforts on critical assets - Regional regulations (GDPR, CCPA, etc.) require local experts with tools to collaborate globally while meeting local requirements ## More from Re:Govern 2025 - [DigiKey: Context Readiness](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/digikey-context-readiness/) (Session Recordings) - [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) - [How Regulated Business are Moving Governance Beyond Compliance](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/regulated-industries-beyond-compliance/) (Highlights) - [Workday's Learnings From its First Talk to Data experiment](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-talk-to-data-learnings/) (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 CME Group Evaluated Vendors for its Context Layer](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/cme-group-evaluation/) (Highlights) - [How DigiKey uses Atlan as a Context Operating System](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/digikey-atlan-context-operating-system/) (Highlights) - [How Data Roles are Evolving: From Modelers to Context Engineers](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/data-modelers-to-context-engineers/) (Highlights) - [Contracts, Context, and Cars: General Motors' Governance Blueprint for the Agentic AI Era](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/contracts-context-and-cars-general-motors/) (Session Recordings) - [How Mastercard is Building AI-Ready Data Products](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/mastercard-ai-ready-data-products/) (Session Recordings) - [The Evolution of Trust: Building the Foundations for Future-Readiness](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/evolution-of-trust/) (Session Recordings) - [Top-Down or Bottom-Up: The World's Largest Exchanges Show Two Paths to AI](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/top-down-or-bottom-up-cme-dbg/) (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/