PODCAST | Mastercard, Chief Data Officer: Responsible Data Innovation Takes the Whole Village

Riddhiman Das: Hello and welcome to the CDO Magazine interview series. My name is Riddhiman Das, and I am with TripleBlind. We're partnering with CDO Magazine, MIT CDOIQ and the International Society of Chief Data Officers in a series of interviews. Today, I have the pleasure of talking to JoAnn Stonier, the Chief Data Officer at Mastercard.

Welcome, JoAnn. The first question for you is, who in your opinion is responsible for making sure the innovation happening around data broadly is responsible. Is it regulators? Is it up to the companies themselves? Is it more a technology solution that helps you do that?

JoAnn Stonier: So I think it takes the whole community, right? I think we all have roles to play. I think regulation always has a role, but as a lawyer, I can tell you that regulation lags innovation. The law can only innovate what is already in existence, and innovators by their nature are always at the leading edge. So the law can't be there yet. It has to wait for something to be in existence.

I think regulation is necessary, but responsible innovation has to be done by organizations. And technology is a tool for that. Both the people who create the platforms, the processes, and the systems also have to be responsible in how they innovate. So I think it takes a village.

At Mastercard, if you think about it, our AI governance takes a village to really pull that off. To your point, we have our data responsibility principles - that's our framework and how we design. Our entire community of individuals who design our products understand those principles, but for AI in practice, it's data scientists, our data designers and data quality folks. Along with other reviewers, it can include a lawyer, it can include our privacy team, it can include our security team. It certainly includes some of our folks that focus on data ethics and responsible data practices. 

We review together what are the potential impacts within certain data domains. Because it's different impacts. If you're doing a fraud product or a credit scoring product, or a product that's just an econometric analysis or a marketing program, quite frankly, all of those are going to be different. So responsible innovation is kind of aware innovation, but it's a responsibility that everybody shares. And I know sometimes I get pushback saying only large organizations can do this. But I think any size of organization that's innovating with data has the responsibility of understanding the data they're using, how they're using it and what the impacts are.

If you're not doing that, I don't know that you should be innovating with data, quite frankly, because we're at this kind of pivot of connected ecosystems that everybody's learning from each other and the systems are learning from each other. So one error can get so badly amplified if we're not really designing in a responsible and aware way. I do think it takes the whole village. My answer to you is everybody: regulators, organizations, companies, academic institutions, governments, as well as the technology to enable.

Riddhiman: That's really fantastic and I really appreciate how comprehensively you’re thinking about this as a multivariate problem. Because, often I talk to people and they say responsible innovation is generalizability, or it's about diverse data sets.

JoAnn: You want to minimize life, right? But don't you want to create a future that everybody can participate in? Don't you want to create a positive future rather than a negative future? I think if you look at it from that lens, rather than, “Oh, I have to do something.” I say this all the time, just look at it as a design brief. Regulation provides one set of restrictions. But if you approach it from what kind of future you want to design, I think you get to much more rich conversations. You have a much more open-ended conversation, and it becomes part and parcel of how you innovate, which makes it much more enriching. And you get to have many more inclusive conversations.

Riddhiman: Absolutely! I love it. It's so inspiring to hear you lay out a vision here. This is great. So how does a chief data officer like yourself think about evaluating, discovering and implementing privacy enhancing technologies, or PETS as we might be starting to call them?

JoAnn: We are always looking at new technology in a lot of different areas, but as you might suspect as a former chief privacy officer, privacy-enhancing technologies have a little sweet spot in my heart.

Because protecting people's privacy interests is always something that I'm going to personally be interested in. And so we're doing a fair amount of evaluation in this area, looking at different techniques. And I do really find this interesting, because we've come a really long way from hashing of data and salting of data to the new tools and techniques of obfuscation, anonymization, synthetic data, differential privacy, looking at secure multi-party computation. What we're actually doing is looking at putting lots of these different tests together and how we can put those together in ways that enable analytics and insight creation but in a way that ensures privacy protection.

So while we don't collect that much personal information about individuals, we believe the card number is personally identifiable and other data elements that we would have are personally identifiable to an individual. We're always looking for ways to protect that information, to obfuscate that information, and to remove it from what we need.

I’ve got to tell you, the new techniques are really interesting in how they enable you to do calculations in partnership with other organizations in particular. And that's what we're exploring right now. We have a couple of different pilots going, where we are working to actually look at combinations of tools.

We bring them into a secure sandbox inside of Mastercard to do those tasks. To create a synthetic data set and then apply some of these new techniques. I'll let you know how it goes, but we're hopeful that in 2022, we should have some POC that we'll get.

Further down the road I'm excited to see what we might build in partnership with some of these outside organizations. So stay tuned, more to come.

Riddhiman: Good luck to you. And again, as always, you're thinking about this far more comprehensively than just, “This one technique will solve all my privacy enhancing technology problems.” You’re thinking about synthetic data, about different forms of privacy.

JoAnn: I think we're on the verge of a future where we're going to need lots of different tools in our toolkit to solve different issues, and in order to actually partner and share information with other organizations in ways that are really thoughtful and also just protect it. I think that's what consumers and all stakeholders are asking. We go back to this concept of responsible data practice. I think investing in that kind of thought leadership is just good business practice, but it's part of being responsible with the data that's entrusted to any organization as a data steward.

Riddhiman: That's fantastic. I love it. Thank you for sharing again. So my last question for you, JoAnn, is Mastercard is the leader in _______.  What might that be?

JoAnn: Based on this conversation, I think we are a leader in creating a future of data innovation in a responsible manner. I'd like to think that we're going to lead in responsible data practices for the near term. I'll leave it there for now.

Riddhiman: Especially with your leadership, I'm confident that that's true. Thank you, JoAnn, for joining me today. Please visit CDOmagazine.tech for additional interviews.