Earlier today, Visa announced its plans to purchase BioCatch. All the financial and timing details are covered in the official announcement. 

I wanted to use this blog to elaborate a bit more on how this does (and doesn’t) change how we operate and what we strive to accomplish going forward.

The same us

BioCatch isn’t going anywhere. Post-acquisition, we will continue to operate as we have, but now as part of Visa.

I also am not going anywhere. With Visa, we will keep our entire leadership team and reporting structure intact, and we are excited to join its Value-Added Services organization.

We will continue to serve the same financial institutions the same way we always have: with market-leading technologies and white-glove service from a team of solution engineers, threat analysts, engagement managers, and global advisors, all working closely with banking teams.

We continue to work toward the same business goals and in pursuit of the same mission: to revolutionize how financial institutions recognize and stop fraud, scams, and financial crime to make banking safer every day. Pivoting from point-in-time authentication to a continuous assessment of user intent is no longer some prescient strategy shift deployed by the world’s most forward-thinking banks. It’s rapidly becoming status quo for those institutions serious about protecting their customers and reducing operational expenses.

The opportunity

Visa operates in more than 200 countries and territories, working with nearly 14,500 financial institutions. Its more than 5 billion payment credentials can be used at more than 175 million merchant locations around the world. In the last year alone, Visa cardholders conducted more than 329 billion total transactions worth a combined $17 trillion-plus in total volume.

For BioCatch, this represents a massive opportunity. When we can apply our behavioral and device intelligence to score the authenticity and safety of those hundreds of billions of transactions, we proactively protect those billions of card accounts and tens of thousands of financial institutions. This not only represents an exponential expansion of our business but also a substantial step toward accomplishing our mission of making the world a safer place to transact, preserving digital trust, and protecting a greater number of consumers from fraud, scams, and financial crime.

Combining BioCatch with Visa allows us to benefit from one another, enhancing the value we can each offer to partner institutions. As our intelligence-sharing capabilities evolve, we will also be able to offer a compelling value proposition for banks seeking to enhance their fraud prevention coverage.

Fighting back

The reality is, as a society and industry, we are not winning this fight. By every metric, the bad actors (increasingly and primarily organized crime) perpetrating fraud, scams, and financial crime continue to enjoy greater returns, explosive growth, and a wealth of new tools to help them scale, innovate, and hone their attacks.

The value of fraud and scam losses and the number of fraud and scam attempts, mule accounts, and victims of these financial crimes all continue to grow (in some cases, exponentially) every year, all around the world.

Banks and markets deploying BioCatch represent the one exception to this trend. Our customers recognize more fraud, stop more attacks, and save more would-be victims more money than financial institutions relying on legacy defenses. In those markets where we’ve launched BioCatch Trust™, real-time interbank intelligence sharing even further amplifies the efficacy of our behavioral intelligence.

With Visa, we can not only bring that protection and those savings to more financial institutions in more places but also enable the greater payments and transactions world to benefit from our behavioral and device intelligence. Together, we will establish a more comprehensive view of all the interconnected elements behind every fraud or scam, protecting more people around the world from falling victim to fraud, scams, and financial crime.

Resources:

• News release: Visa to acquire BioCatch