Card network companies, including No. 1 Visa, have increasingly added services to their portfolio of offerings to expand the value-added tools, beyond card services, that they can sell their customers.

The Mastercard spokesperson declined to say how many employees Baffin Bay has or whether they’ll be kept on after the merger, though he noted LinkedIn and Crunchbase estimate the company’s headcount at between 11 and 50 workers.

As part of the announcement Monday, Mastercard said it’s in the process of integrating its cyber defenses into a single cyber service that it makes available to all its customers. 

“Today’s increasingly digital world has delivered greater convenience and increased opportunities for people, businesses and governments,” Mastercard said in the release. “At the same time, it has exposed the need to strengthen protection against criminals who exploit this technology through malware, ransomware and distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.” Mastercard noted DDOS incursions rose 22% last year.

Baffin Bay’s automated service uses cloud-based artificial intelligence filtering of internet traffic to spot malicious attack attempts and stop the attackers from taking down systems, the release said.

By Lynne Marek on March 20, 2023
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