How have you prepared for this?

One of the things that MasterCard did really well a few years ago is that we rewrote our core processing systems. We had some really good technology architects who did a great job thinking about what we need to have to support the future. They came up with this concept: Our systems really needed to be agnostic as far as it went to the point of interaction.

So whether a transaction is originated via a contactless card, a cell phone, the Internet or just a regular swipe, it shouldn't matter as long as we build the system that is open and can accept the transaction coming from any device. We invested about US$160 million in that rewrite, and it has really paid off well, now that we see more and more different kinds of devices that start a transaction.

How large is MasterCard's data warehouse?

The ultimate goal for MasterCard IT is how do we leverage technology to drive business. The tenet is: We should look to see how we can make every transaction more valuable to all those four stakeholders in our four-party model. The data warehouse is a key component of that whole strategy. Look at the warehouse itself: There's obviously a wealth of data just from the sheer volume of transactions that are being processed, and we know that we can take that data and help our customers better market to their own card holders or better serve their own merchants.

There's over 100 Terabytes of transaction data in our warehouse now. We really believe there's a capability that we're going to have 1.8 Petabytes as this continues to mushroom.

Fraud prevention is a hot topic these days. What's your role in that?

We build specific tools for our banks to use to help augment their own fraud-prevention services. It's funny, the last time I was in Europe my personal card data was compromised. My bank called me before I knew anything about it and told me they were seeing unusual activity. Again, when you can leverage the data of a 100 Terabyte data warehouse, and build neural network type models based on spending patterns and what merchants I typically go to and what places I usually visit and all that, then there's s wealth of data that our customers can use and we can give them tools to help use to help prevent fraud.

It's a constant, constant battle, and something we have to be very vigilant about because the bad guys out there are just as determined to use things the wrong way.

How can data warehouses and large infrastructure operations like yours be green?

We actually believe there's a financial benefit from that as well just in terms of energy consumption. We custom build our data centers, and we had some opportunities to put in, for example, extra high ceilings to disperse some heat. We're heavily into virtualization so that we can reduce the numbers of footprints.

We operate in 210 countries around the world, with 25,000 different financial institutions. In doing that we leverage a global workforce. So part of that is: if I have programmers in Asia, they're using the same server that my programmers in the US are using, but at different times of the day. So I can get better usage of a server by having a global workforce as opposed to having to buy multiple servers, if everybody's in the same location.