Visa plans to boost its cyber, fraud, risk and security solutions with the acquisition of Israeli tech firm BioCatch for $2.4 billion.

Visa signed a definitive agreement Aug. 3 to purchase the Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity and fraud-prevention company that uses behavioral biometrics and AI to detect fraud.

“In the account origination space, we help the bank gauge the risk of how risky a person applying for a bank account is,” Sharell Barshishat, BioCatch’s global advisory director for North America, told FinAi News.

“We sit on the account takeover space, which is protecting users, like your own bank account, from being taken over by adversaries and so on.

“Then we sit on the scam space, where we protect users from being scammed and being coerced,” he said. “And then lastly we sit in the mule account detection space, looking for actual bad guys within the bank themselves.”

BioCatch serves more than 350 banking clients in 21 countries, including more than 100 of the largest banks globally, Barshishat said, including:

• Wells Fargo;
• National Australia Bank; and
• Baxter Credit Union.

Following acquisition, BioCatch will continue to serve its clients and will maintain its leadership team, BioCatch Chief Executive Gadi Mazor wrote in an Aug. 3 blog post.

The transaction is expected to close in March 2027, pending regulatory approval, Visa said in an Aug. 3 release.

“Account takeovers and scams cost the global economy over $1 trillion annually and AI is enabling these attacks at unprecedented scale,” Andrew Torre, president of value-added services at Visa, said in a statement sent to FinAi News.

“BioCatch will help our clients stop fraud before it reaches the point of payment. This acquisition is part of our strategy to help clients prevent cyberthreats upstream, building trust into every transaction.”

Analyzing each keystroke

To reduce risk, BioCatch gathers massive amounts of data in real-time at multiple levels of banking processes and feeds that data into a machine learning model for analysis, Barshishat said.

The model then assigns each action a risk score from one to 1,000 and provides the bank with that score as well as an explanation.

From there, the bank — provided with the rationale behind the score — decides how to proceed, Barshishat said.

For example, when looking at account creation, BioCatch will look at the fluidity with which a user enters their personal information. Do they pause often when typing? Do they backspace a lot? BioCatch looks at all these things, Barshishat said.

“We don’t look at who you are and the state of the identity,” Barshishat said. “It’s more how that identity is being used behaviorally.

“All of that is done in real time, passively to the end user, so the person that’s applying for the account or the person that’s within their banking app has no kind of feel of this happening.”

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