Visa Buys AI Fraud Intelligence Firm BioCatch in $2.4 Billion Cash Deal
In a strategic move to counter the growing menace of cybercrime, global payments leader Visa has announced that it will buy the behavioral biometric technology company BioCatch for $2.4 billion in cash. The transaction entails the purchase of the Israel-based fraud protection company from the private equity company Permira, together with other minority holders.
With the acquisition of BioCatch’s risk intelligence, Visa is looking forward to stopping digital fraud, account takeovers, and social engineering scams at the first sign of a transaction on the network. BioCatch was founded in 2011 and is headed by CEO Gadi Mazor. The company focuses on behavioral AI, which tracks the active online banking session.
Unlike checking the credentials that do not change, behavioral AI looks at thousands of small physical and contextual interactions, including typing behavior, touchscreen swipe patterns, and how users hold their phones while making an attempt to log in to their bank accounts.
This acquisition responds to an ever-growing global crisis. In addition to over $1 trillion worth of annual losses caused by digital scams and account takeovers around the globe, the situation is aggravated by the presence of generative AI technologies that enable the creation of hyper-realistic phishing attacks on an industrial level.
At present, BioCatch already provides protection to over 760 million users of 1.8 billion devices per month through analysis of 19 billion sessions for over 350 banks, including 100 of the largest global financial institutions. For Visa, this acquisition represents the second major purchase of fraud detection technology in less than two years, after their acquisition of transaction monitoring platform Featurespace back in late 2024.
While Featurespace focuses on examining the payment transactions in the terminal, BioCatch detects fraudulent attempts even earlier, in digital banking apps. The deal is expected to be finalized in Q2 2027 fiscal year, placing BioCatch into the Visa Value-Added Services segment overseen by President Andrew Torre.
