Visa acquires behavioral biometrics pioneer BioCatch amid fraud prevention build-up

Visa is acquiring behavioral biometrics and analysis for fraud detection pioneer BioCatch in a $2.4 billion cash deal. While the move comes almost a decade after Mastercard acquired behavioral biometrics provider NuData to boost its security capabilities, the transaction similarly reflects a changing global payments market.

BioCatch has been owned by a group of shareholders including funds advised by Permira since a $1.3 billion deal in 2024.

Tel Aviv-based BioCatch has 760 million users around the world, including through 350 banking clients, three of them among the top four in the U.S. by assets. The company reported earlier this year that it reached $185 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) during 2025.

While the implied multiple on earnings is high, BioCatch’s established customer base, growth and unique portfolio and IP make it something of a biometric fraud prevention outlier.

The company has been steadily adding additional signals from the application, network and device levels to its behavioral biometrics capabilities.

“Real-time insights into customer intent continue to grow increasingly essential for institutions to establish trust within digital banking sessions,” BioCatch CEO Gadi Mazor says in the company announcement. “For more than a decade, we’ve demonstrated behavior’s unique ability to distinguish the criminal from the legitimate. In the last couple of years, we’ve shown how real-time intelligence-sharing networks between our customers can amplify the power of our behavioral intelligence further still. Together with Visa, we’re even better positioned to advance our mission of making the world a safer place to transact and protect consumers from financial crime.”

The acquisition highlights the increasing attractiveness of biometrics providers with major fraud detection footprints to larger financial services organizations facing down the twin threats of AI-powered fraud and a payments landscape that is shifting away from cards.

Visa leans into security, fraud prevention

Visa’s investments over recent years in digital identity and fraud prevention technologies have included work on payment passkeys, tools for AI agent fraud prevention like the recently-launched Visa Vulnerability Agentic Harness and connections between the payment ecosystem and digital ID wallets.

The company says these investments so far add up to $13 billion.

BioCatch gives the American payments giant a suite of technologies for cybercrime and fraud detection and prevention from account onboarding to transaction authorization.

Visa notes the interconnection of AI, biometrics and identity with fraud prevention and cybersecurity in its announcement, and the need to stay ahead of existing threats to its network and clients.

“Account takeovers and scams cost the global economy over $1 trillion annually and AI is enabling these attacks at unprecedented scale,” says Visa’s President of Value-Added Services Andrew Torre. “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 cyber threats upstream, building trust into every transaction.”

The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2027, contingent on the usual conditions.

Article Topics

AI fraud  |  behavioral biometrics  |  BioCatch  |  biometrics  |  fraud prevention  |  Visa