MICHELE CENTEMERO
MASTERCARD
Scams are the most prevalent form of fraud worldwide and can range from romance scams and fake job adverts to fraudulent charity appeals and deceptive shopping deals. Scammers are able to adapt quickly to modern events, which means scams often have relevance to national or geopolitical events – for example elections, tax returns or highprofile sporting events – making them even more believable.
While technology is constantly being engineered to stay one step ahead of fraudsters, scams can be harder to combat than other attacks as consumers often approve the transactions themselves, making it trickier for providers to identify them as fraudulent and stop them occurring.
MICHELE CENTEMERO
TITLE: EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, SERVICES, EUROPE
COMPANY: MASTERCARD
INDUSTRY: FINANCIAL SERVICES AND TECHNOLOGY
LOCATION: EUROPE
Michele has held senior leadership roles at Mastercard since 2008, driving growth across payments and e-commerce. He previously led Mastercard’ s Italy business and held leadership positions at Reuters and PMI.
Q. HOW HAS FINANCIAL CRIME EVOLVED WITH TECHNOLOGY SUCH AS AI?
» AI is playing a particularly significant role in the changing threat landscape as it allows criminals to operate at greater speed and sophistication than ever before. Generative AI, for example, can be used to create highly- convincing phishing emails, fake websites, deepfake audio and other social engineering scams in seconds and deployed on a huge scale.
To keep pace with changing threat tactics, AI is also becoming a major component of cybersecurity, helping to combat these new forms of fraud as quickly as they emerge.
96 September 2026