Visa to buy Israeli cyber firm for $2.4 billion to fight AI-driven scams

Sharon Wrobel is a tech reporter for The Times of Israel

Credit-card giant Visa Inc. has agreed to buy Israeli online fraud and financial crime detection provider BioCatch for $2.4 billion to bolster its cybersecurity tools and protect consumers and institutions from the growing threat of AI-driven account takeovers and scams.

Visa said it is acquiring BioCatch from London-based private equity firm Permira and other investors. As part of the deal, the Israeli pioneer in the field of behavioral biometrics will become part of Visa, but will continue to operate with the same team. The transaction is expected to close by the end of Visa’s fiscal second quarter of 2027, pending customary regulatory approvals and conditions.

“Account takeovers and scams cost the global economy over $1 trillion annually and AI is enabling these attacks at unprecedented scale,” said Andrew Torre, Visa president of value-added services. “BioCatch will help our clients stop fraud before it reaches the point of payment.”

Over the past five years, Visa has invested more than $13 billion in technology and infrastructure to safeguard its payments ecosystem and reduce fraud rates.

“The reality is, as a society and industry, we are not winning this fight,” said BioCatch CEO Gadi Mazor. “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.”

“Banks and markets deploying BioCatch represent the one exception to this trend,” Mazor asserted.

Founded in 2011 by Avi Turgeman and Uri Rivner, BioCatch has developed a behavioral biometrics platform for analyzing thousands of network signals such as keystrokes, mouse activity, and touch screen tapping, as people interact with their digital banking applications and devices. Everyone has a distinctive way of moving a mouse, tapping a phone or typing on a keyboard, and behavioral biometrics are able to measure and analyze these patterns.

Fed with these data inputs, BioCatch’s AI and machine learning models detect signs to distinguish legitimate users from fraudsters in real time.

BioCatch said its platform serves more than 350 banking clients in 21 different countries, including more than 100 of the largest banks, and offers protection to 1.8 billion devices and 760 million users around the world.

Visa is working with 14,500 financial institutions, processing more than 329 billion transactions annually, worth a combined $17 trillion.

“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,” said Mazor.

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