CSO Compass Awards 2010: Richard Gunthner

VP of Global Security, MasterCard

By Bill Brandel

May 06, 2010 — CSO — Law enforcement is nothing new to Richard Gunthner. At MasterCard, he is the liaison to a number of agencies, including the FBI, Secret Service, CIA and Department of State. When he was the Regional Security Manager for American Airlines, he fought terrorism, drug trafficking, human smuggling and travel documentation fraud. He is highly regarded by peers in the industry association ASIS. In every context, he emphasizes the importance of understanding security's impact on the business.

See the full list of this year's Compass Award winners

CSO: How has the economy impacted MasterCard's security practices?
Richard Gunthner: In this economic climate, we are all being asked to do more with a lot less, think smarter and reduce expenses. Using technology and careful negotiations with vendors, we have been able to maximize our productivity while running a very tight and lean security organization. We've reduced our expenses by 25% over the last couple of years. We are doing more with more resources deployed, but for less money.

How do you see the CSO leadership role evolving?
We spend a lot of time performing analysis of intelligence and news feeds to attempt to predict future events. We are looking at trending and trying to learn from lessons of the past, and implement measures to mitigate risks and avoid those issues from impacting us in the future.

It's fairly easy to respond after something bad happens, but harder to look across the horizon and connect those dots and predict what could be happening and institute procedures to mitigate those threats and avoid the impact on your company, facilities and employees.

What do you consider to be the most difficult or rewarding accomplishment of your career?
I was the regional security manager for airline operations at 53 airports in the Caribbean, Latin America and Mexico. Our biggest challenge was to keep drugs from coming into the United States via aircraft. We were not only concerned with drug-producing countries, but transshipment points as well. There is so much money behind drug trafficking that there is the potential for many people to be corrupted. Drug traffickers use very sophisticated means to hide their contraband, such as having mules swallowing large quantities of drugs, or putting drugs in the stem of a flower, or having drugs manufactured into cardboard box corrugation. It was a very difficult challenge, but one that we were very successful in combating.

If a CSO could get budget approval for one security investment, what should it be?
Invest in analysis capabilities. Have at least one analyst—or more—who can take intelligence and news feeds from around the world and analyze them. Let the analysts look at trends, at lessons from the past, and indicators of bad things to come, but most importantly, put things in local perspective: Is this a regular occurrence, or something out of the usual? Analysis allows for short- or long-term mitigation measures to be implemented.

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