---
title: "Mastercard's Blueprint for Modern Data Governance"
url: "https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/mastercard-data-governance-blueprint/"
description: "Vivek Radhakrishnan and Fabien Thiaucourt from Mastercard reveal why they didn't start their governance modernization with tools"
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's Blueprint for Modern Data Governance** - 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-data-governance-blueprint/.

## 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 modernization began with a clear outcome: any user, anywhere in the world, should discover trustworthy, contextualized data in minutes across on-prem and cloud environments. Only after defining that experience did they look for partners (not just platforms) who could deliver strong performance across platform capabilities, governance features, and technology integration - without locking them into rigid frameworks.

Key takeaways:

- Start with outcomes for specific people, not tools - define what working with data should feel like first
- Collaboration between data producers, users, and subject matter experts is the foundation of effective governance
- Integration across systems brings quality metrics, ownership, lineage, and trust signals into one shared source of truth
- Evaluate partners across all dimensions - excellent lineage but poor performance isn't good enough
- Philosophy matters as much as features: flexibility, openness, and extensibility ensure governance grows with your strategy

## More from Re:Govern 2025

- [Virgin Media O2: Context for All](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/virgin-media-o2-context-for-all/) (Session Recordings)
- [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)
- [How Data Roles are Evolving: From Modelers to Context Engineers](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/data-modelers-to-context-engineers/) (Highlights)
- [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)
- [Modern Data & AI Governance Blueprint](https://atlan.com/blueprint) (Resources)

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