Mitek adds HooYu biometric identity orchestration in £98M acquisition

Mitek has acquired remote customer onboarding platform HooYu in a £98 million (approximately US$129.2 million) deal to upgrade its digital identity orchestration and help businesses link the biometric verification of their customers with real-time checks of bureau and sanctions databases.

The companies point out in the announcement that the United Nations estimates 3 percent of global GDP is laundered, nearly $2 trillion a year. The emergence of cryptocurrency and NFT markets has increased the number of avenues available to would-be money launderers and fraudsters.

“Our current geopolitical, commercial and technological environment represents a perfect storm for bad actors. Mitek is leading the fight against fraud by providing the technology that businesses need to stamp out digital money launderers and sanctioned individuals,” comments Max Carnecchia, CEO of Mitek Systems. “The only way to combat this scourge is to use artificial intelligence (AI) and stop bad transactions before they happen.”

The process of merging the companies together has already begun, Carnecchia said in an investor call on the acquisition.

The combined companies allow organizations to combine biometrics, ID document validation, geolocation, and identity confidence scores with real-time checks against data sources like politically exposed persons (PEP) lists. Mitek customers can use HooYu’s orchestration capabilities to optimize workflows and accelerate their digital identity solutions deployments across various channels.

In the longer term, the acquisition of HooYu is expected to support Mitek’s vision to extend its know your customer (KYC) and AML compliance and biometric onboarding capabilities to provide reusable digital identity.

“With this acquisition, we’re going to be adding a number of powerful additional checks, and the coordination and orchestration steps that make it very easy not just to get it implemented, but then also to own it and manage it over time,” Carnecchia says in a promotional video accompanying the release.

“Having a single platform that easily orchestrates and configures a KYC journey to manage identities and identify bad actors is becoming a prerequisite for any business transacting digitally,” says HooYu CEO Keith Marsden. “Bringing together Mitek’s lead in identity, liveness and biometrics, with our orchestration, configuration and journey services simplifies identity management for financial institutions.”

Carnecchia also notes that HooYu operates in the global financial services hub of London, and that with Mitek’s recent acquisition of ID R&D in a $49 million deal in mid-2021, he believes the combined companies now offer the most complete digital identity platform available in the market.

Article Topics

acquisitions  |  AML  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  HooYu  |  identity orchestration  |  identity verification  |  KYC  |  Mitek  |  stocks