Defaulting to Efficiency: Building an Embedded FinOps Function at Mastercard

Most organizations already know where the waste is. The hard part is making it easy for teams to act. Dan Cronin from Mastercard shares how his team built an embedded FinOps function, qualified over 400 optimization opportunities through a FinOps Value Funnel, and achieved a 40% year-on-year efficiency gain. Dan explores how to build trust with engineering teams, qualifying opportunities by ROI rather than chasing every recommendation, a detailed logging optimization case study, the intersection of FinOps and platform engineering, designing systems where efficiency is the default behavior, and how to present optimization work so leadership actually acts on it. Speaker: Dan Cronin — Mastercard Recorded March 24, 2026 at FinOps X Day London, CodeNode. Join us at FinOps X: https://x.finops.org FinOps Framework: https://finops.org/framework #finops #finopsx #embeddedfinops