As Executive Vice President and Division President of West Arabia, Adam Jones oversees Mastercard’s operations across Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and Yemen, markets at the center of some of the most ambitious digital transformation programs in the world.
In this interview with Economy Middle East, Jones addresses the practical challenges of making AI-driven payments trustworthy, what Mastercard’s new Cyber Resilience Center in Riyadh has revealed how Saudi institutions handle crises, and why the distinction between cybersecurity and fraud prevention is fast disappearing.
In the world of payments, trust is both the biggest enabler and barrier to adoption and scale. Without robust security and interoperability standards, agentic commerce risks a false start, because a few high-profile fraud cases could undermine the entire ecosystem.
As fraudsters come up with increasingly sophisticated techniques, powered by AI, defenses must evolve too, so continuous monitoring and adaptive AI are critical for staying ahead of emerging threats. Industry standards and franchise rules play a key role in enabling merchants to recognize legitimate agentic transactions.
At Mastercard, we are collaborating with tech pioneers like Google, EMVCo, and the FIDO Alliance to set standards for agent verification and secure payments.
At Mastercard, we view cybersecurity as a key enabler of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. The launch of the Cyber Resilience Center in Riyadh strengthens our commitment to helping secure the Kingdom’s digital infrastructure by protecting critical systems, data, and operations.
The center focuses on developing a range of cybersecurity solutions that combine global intelligence, regional partnerships, and advanced capabilities. We focus on education, standards, and risk assessments to help organizations strengthen their cybersecurity posture in a structured and measurable way.
We also support the development of local cybersecurity talent by working with financial institutions to offer certifications in Arabic and hosting knowledge-sharing sessions. At the same time, we help organizations benchmark their cybersecurity maturity and track progress. This is complemented by cyber crisis exercises and threat-casting workshops to help them prepare for real-world incidents and improve their response.
We are working with the leading banks in the Kingdom to enhance third-party risk management, cyber crisis readiness, and overall resilience.
Through our work with leading banks in Saudi Arabia, one clear pattern has emerged: the real challenge is not detection, it is decision-making under pressure. Most institutions have strong security capabilities, but the real test comes when teams need to coordinate quickly and make the right decisions during a live incident. At the same time, third-party exposure is becoming one of the main entry points for cyberattacks, making third-party risk a top priority for the sector.
We also see a shift in how resilience is defined. It is no longer avoiding incidents altogether, but how quickly institutions can contain and recover from them. This is where structured cyber crisis exercises have made a real difference, helping banks align internally, clarify roles, and respond faster when it matters most.
A key learning from this perspective is that cyber risk and fraud are no longer separate challenges—they are rapidly converging, both in how threats operate and in how the market is responding. Attackers increasingly exploit the overlap between digital vulnerabilities and fraudulent activity, prompting organizations to move away from siloed defenses toward a more unified approach. We are seeing a clear industry trend toward fusing cyber and fraud capabilities, leveraging shared intelligence, analytics, and monitoring to detect and disrupt threats across both domains simultaneously. In response, Mastercard is investing heavily in advanced Threat Intelligence, using insights drawn from cyber signals to inform fraud prevention strategies and vice versa, ultimately helping to close the cyber‑fraud gap and strengthen resilience end to end.
We are proactively working with regulators and industry stakeholders to ensure that the Cyber Resilience Center in Riyadh continues to deliver practical, measurable impact, while helping organizations improve their cyber readiness over time.
The digital world has created endless ways to connect, introducing new avenues for commerce but also more opportunities for bad actors to exploit them. Protecting the connections that power the digital economy requires a collective effort.
At Mastercard, we are harnessing the power of partnerships around the world to make this protection a reality. With our unwavering commitment to improving trust in the global digital ecosystem, expansive view of the evolving threat landscape, and advanced AI-powered data analytics, our cybersecurity capabilities give businesses the confidence to securely thrive and innovate in a connected world.
Since 2018, we have invested approximately $11 billion in cybersecurity innovation. Every year, we process billions of transactions through our network – last year, it was 175 billion. Insights from these interactions, along with real-time monitoring and advanced data science, allow us to detect vulnerabilities faster and with greater precision.
We have acquired several companies with industry-leading capabilities, such as RiskRecon, that have enabled us to boost our cybersecurity proposition. Our latest acquisition in this space is Recorded Future , which strengthens real-time threat intelligence by using AI to analyze large volumes of threat data online to give customers real-time visibility and actionable insights to proactively reduce risks.
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is a region highly targeted by cybercriminals due to its oil-rich economies and rapid pace of digitization, with revenue in its cybersecurity market estimated to reach $4.63 billion in 2025 . As the digital economy grows, strong cybersecurity and fraud prevention are essential to building trust across the MENA financial ecosystem. I believe collaboration will deepen to counter the ever-changing threat landscape and the expanding cyberattack surface.
At Mastercard, we’ve been focusing on authenticating and tokenizing agentic transactions to prevent fraud and lost value. We are using our advanced technology and expertise to help usher in a new era of trusted AI-powered commerce.
Last year, we launched Mastercard Agent Pay that integrates with agentic AI to deliver smarter, more secure, and more personal payment experiences to consumers, merchants, and issuers. The groundbreaking solution takes the best of our multi-layered security technology, like network tokens, advanced authentication, fraud prevention and detection, and combines that with the rules and standards needed to bring transparency to agent-driven payments. User intent isn’t assumed – it’s verified with biometric authentication, consented, and central to every interaction.
To safeguard the ecosystem, we are also making every transaction auditable, managing disputes via credential directories and developing liability frameworks that mirror today’s card protections. This helps us ensure that convenience never comes at the cost of peace of mind.
We are working with global AI leaders, like Microsoft, OpenAI, and IBM, and with key payment enablers, like Braintree and Checkout.com, to bring Agent Pay to consumers and merchants worldwide and across our region.
You’re right to be skeptical of the term “customer-centricity” – it’s one of the most overused and underdefined phrases in business. For us at Mastercard, it’s the core pillar of our strategy.
Our approach is based on understanding the needs of our diverse customer base, working out ways of meeting them, and building an ecosystem, accessible to all, where these needs converge instead of competing. We focus on making things as simple, seamless, and secure as possible for our customers.
The most significant tension in payments exists between security and seamlessness. Historically, adding security meant adding friction. A password, a PIN, a security question – each step, while intended to protect the user, makes the experience more cumbersome.
At Mastercard, we believe you don’t have to sacrifice security for convenience. Instead of applying the same level of security to every single transaction, we use technology to apply the right amount of security at the right time.
Our AI-powered network assesses the real-time risk of every transaction based on diverse variables – the device, the location, the merchant, the purchase amount, and the customer’s historical behavior. For example, if you are buying your morning coffee from your usual café with your phone, the risk is extremely low, so the transaction can be approved instantly, with no extra steps. If, however, a large purchase is suddenly attempted from a new device in a different country, our system will recognize the risk and introduce a “step-up” challenge, like biometric authentication or a one-time code sent to your phone.
Mastercard Gateway is now part of Mastercard Merchant Cloud , a -generation payments platform that unifies our market-leading services to help businesses navigate the complexities of commerce around the world.
Five years from now, we see the payments landscape as a collaborative ecosystem, built on shared principles of security, innovation, and interoperability. In this ecosystem, payment companies will serve as local partners with a global reach, providing robust and secure networks while governments and local partners maintain control over their data and infrastructure.
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We are keen supporters of Vision 2030 and are committed to playing a key role in achieving Saudi Arabia’s goal to increase the of digital transactions to 80 percent by 2030. A prime example of our commitment is our strategic partnership with Riyadh Air, the Kingdom’s new national carrier. This collaboration goes beyond payments; we are co-creating an entire ecosystem to redefine the global travel experience, reinforcing Saudi Arabia’s role as a global travel hub and supporting the economic diversification goals of Vision 2030. We will continue to invest in local infrastructure to provide world-class experiences beyond payments that benefit consumers, merchants, and acquirers alike.
As the Kingdom’s digital landscape evolves, our focus is shifting from promoting the adoption of digital transactions to building trust in the digital ecosystem through the work of our Cyber Resilience Center in Riyadh.
As for the most promising innovations, AI is the driving force that is redefining West Arabia’s payments landscape, and agentic commerce is the frontier. I also see great potential in technologies that support the shift towards a passwordless future, such as tokenization and biometric authentication.
Tokenization replaces a payment card number with a token, or a stand-in number. This protects a consumer account because the merchant never sees or stores the original number, and even if a physical card is lost or stolen, the tokenized version can still be used. This way, tokenization safeguards sensitive data and secures every transaction.
At Mastercard, we process over a billion tokenized transactions on our network every week, and we have more tokens enabled for digital payments than we have physical cards in circulation. We aim to tokenize every transaction on our network by 2030 .
We also see potential for further convergence of tokenization with identity verification and management. This involves using biometric authentication, behavioral analytics, and AI-driven identity verification to ensure that every transaction is not only secure but also authenticated by the true account holder.
In this context, we have launched Mastercard Payment Passkey , with a planned expansion across the region. This innovative solution streamlines e-commerce and revolutionizes the consumer journey by eliminating the need for one-time passwords and enabling device-based biometric authentication methods, such as fingerprinting, facial recognition, or iris scans. The service makes transactions not only faster but also more secure against fraud and scams.
In this dynamic landscape, we will continue to create groundbreaking solutions that empower our partners with unmatched capabilities with built-in trust, redefining the future of commerce.