Mastercard Taps cloudflare to Deliver A–F Cybersecurity 'Report Card' for Small Businesses
Mastercard has formed a technology partnership with cloudflare to add web-security tooling to its risk-management suite, creating a continuously updating security grading system and deployable defenses aimed at small businesses, governments and critical infrastructure. The initiative stitches cloudflare’s security stack into existing third-party risk products to give customers an at-a-glance view of exposure and the ability to apply automated protections.
What the new offering delivers
The integrated service connects cloudflare’s security portfolio with tools that already assess third-party and supply-chain risk. Customers will be able to detect internet-facing domains and software attacks that interact with a company’s attack surface and see a recurring A through F security rating. That grade derives from checks for basic security controls, software vulnerabilities, exposed infrastructure and risk stemming from external parties, and the score is surfaced in a single security dashboard with context on criticality and severity.
Beyond scoring, the combined product enables actionable controls — firewalls, encryption, and automated defenses can be activated to remediate identified weaknesses. The monitoring function is designed to produce a regularly updating posture view rather than a one-time snapshot, giving administrators a way to track improvements or regressions over time.
"With small businesses accounting for about half of the world's GDP, closing the resilience gap is critical to securing the foundation of our global economy, " said Johan Gerber, global head of Security Solutions at Mastercard. Stephanie Cohen, chief strategy officer at cloudflare, added that many smaller organizations are "target rich but resource poor, " facing attacks at higher rates than larger enterprises and needing simpler, integrated defenses.
Who stands to benefit — and how they'll use it
The primary audience is small and medium-sized businesses that lack dedicated security teams, along with government entities and operators of critical infrastructure. For those users, the package is meant to function both as an early-warning system and a set of defensive tools that can be toggled without deep in-house expertise. The service emphasizes third-party exposure and supply-chain risk, areas where organizations often lack visibility.
Early adopters include national cybersecurity offices that view the collaboration as part of a broader push to harden essential services. "As society and global economies increasingly rely on digital networks, we must combine our efforts across the public and private sectors to build resilience and prevent cyber incidents, " said Dan Cimpean, Director of the Romanian National Cyber Security Directorate.
Practically, a merchant or local government could receive a grade reflecting exposed services and critical vulnerabilities, review the contextual severity notes, and deploy recommended protections from the same dashboard — shortening the time from detection to mitigation.
Strategic ripple effects for payments and security
The move reflects a wider strategy of positioning payments companies as vendors of broader risk and security services instead of only transaction processors. By embedding cloudflare’s capabilities in its risk products, Mastercard is expanding its addressable market into cyber resilience and managed security for smaller customers who generate substantial economic activity.
Rival firms have pursued similar paths: in late 2024, a major payments company acquired a fraud and risk firm to build a risk hub that profiles transaction and account-level behavior. The industry challenge remains balancing stronger defenses with the need to keep payments fast and frictionless; too heavy-handed an approach risks slowing transactions or undermining adoption of new digital payment forms.
For investors and corporate customers, the near-term metrics to watch will be customer adoption rates, product rollouts, and any financial disclosures that quantify the contribution of security services to overall revenue. Over time, broader uptake could shift how payments firms are valued, adding a sustained services revenue stream beyond interchange and processing.
Deployment and customer response will determine whether the partnership becomes a decisive step toward integrated cyber risk services or a niche offering for larger clients with security budgets. Either way, the move underlines the increasing centrality of cybersecurity in the business models of payment networks and their technology partners.
