Earlier this month, Nasdaq Verafin and BioCatch announced a strategic partnership.

I know both of these companies well. I was a BioCatch customer and I’ve contributed to this blog space for a number of years now.

So, while traveling in Canada, I decided to drop by the Nasdaq Verafin headquarters in St. John’s Newfoundland to learn more. There, I met with a couple of members of the Verafin team, Head of Brand Strategy Molly Baker and Marketing Director Brendan O’Keefe. BioCatch Chief Strategy Officer Ameilia Ahlgren dialed in remotely.

This is a story about two companies that provide very strong fraud control solutions to their customers. BioCatch analyzes more than 3,000 unique datapoints, from behavioral biometrics to device attributes. Nasdaq Verafin leverages a consortium data network of 725 million counterparties to support 2,600 banks with anomaly detection of critical transactions, including wires and automatic clearing house (ACH). BioCatch launched inter-bank, scams-data-sharing networks centered on behavior and device intelligence in both Australia and Argentina.

What this new relationship is about is taking the best of both companies and sharing it collectively with their customers. As covered in the news release: “The initial phase of the partnership will include the integration of BioCatch alerts and insights into the Nasdaq Verafin platform.” During the meeting, both companies explained how this will work.

A single pane of glass

Crucially, more than 70% of BioCatch’s midmarket customer base also uses Nasdaq Verafin. It was this cohort that repeatedly requested these two companies do more together.

For these mutual customers, Nasdaq Verafin has added a connector that feeds BioCatch analytics directly into the primary Nasdaq Verafin platform. This allows investigators to see both the critical BioCatch summary score and the Nasdaq Verafin critical scores all in one place.

This first phase of this partnership will save these customers from having to click between multiple systems when assessing transactions. This is the future for the fraud analyst: aggregating critical data in one pane of glass.

The next part of this initial phase will be to introduce BioCatch to the other Nasdaq Verafin customers. Those customers will really get a boost from BioCatch’s analytics, gaining insights into the endpoint risk — from the session level to the device —  to enhance the detection of fraud and scams.

This relationship is significant when you look at the customers of both companies. BioCatch, with more than 300 customers, is heavy on top-tier financial institutions (FIs). Nasdaq Verafin, with more than 2,600 customers of all sizes, is very strong in the mid-market fraud and AML space. Together, these companies cover global FIs of all sizes. There are very few partnerships with this mix of customers.

I asked what can be expected in subsequent phases. The two companies pointed to the fact they share a mission to eradicate crime from the global financial system. When I look at the capabilities of Nasdaq Verafin — with a consortium data approach across their fraud and AML solutions — and of BioCatch’s strong money mule detection and its top-tier customer base, one starts to imagine what some of the future offerings might look like.

As a former BioCatch customer, what I’ve liked best is the continued innovation I’ve seen out of the company for the last decade: remote-access detection, money mule detection, social engineering scams-detection, and more. Last year, the company introduced BioCatch Trust™ in Australia, a powerful data consortium with the major Australian banks. In May, BioCatch launched an Argentinian version of this real-time, behavior-based, fraud and scams intelligence-sharing network.

What will happen in subsequent phases of this partnership must wait for another blog. What I will say is: I think this partnership will grow and become quite formidable. 

The importance of partnerships

Now, why is this partnership so important? Both Nasdaq Verafin and BioCatch see the need to accelerate the fight against fraud and scams. Stephanie Champion, Nasdaq executive vice president and head of Nasdaq Verafin, said it best in the news release: “As criminal threats grow in scale and sophistication each day, the need for greater industry collaboration has never been more urgent.”  I see this everyday as I write about fraud and scam losses around the world.

With the advent of the evil twin of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), we are already seeing fraudsters using GenAI tools to defeat controls that have been in place for years. Fraudsters can now create intelligent AI agents and bots that can do the research to collect the information necessary to initiate and execute attacks in a very credible way. Doing this at scale can overwhelm many in-depth security solutions.

As attacks grow smarter and more frequent, collaboration is no longer optional. And remember: Attacks often originate from organized crime groups and sometimes even nation-states. They are effectively breaching many companies every week, stealing personal information and credentials, using social engineering against consumers every minute of the day to scam hundreds of billions of dollars around the world, and defeating weak account opening controls at financial institutions (stolen personally identifiable information, counterfeit identity documents, increasingly obsolete liveness testing, etc.) to create many money mule accounts (and getting bank customers to give up bank credentials for a fee for the rest of the money mule accounts they need).

The building blocks for what’s to come

Nasdaq Verafin and BioCatch are stepping out ahead with this new partnership. They are acknowledging the importance of sharing powerful consortium data and behavioral intelligence in the fight against fraud and scams. They have the first phase well-defined, and it will be a real benefit to BioCatch and Nasdaq Verafin customers. With the capabilities both companies have, I can clearly see the potential for subsequent phases to deliver a powerful, global solution in the fight against fraud.