Visa buys BioCatch for $2.4B to fight fraud

Visa will pay $2.4 billion in cash to buy BioCatch, a Tel Aviv-based company that uses behavioral biometrics to stop fraudsters before they steal money. The deal, announced on August 3, is Visa’s latest push to lock down payments against the $1 trillion in global losses banks and merchants suffer every year from account takeovers and scams. Visa says AI-driven attacks are growing so fast that banks can’t keep up without sharper tools at the network level.

BioCatch tracks how users type, swipe and hold their devices to spot imposters in real time. It already protects 1.8 billion devices and 760 million users across 350 banking clients in 21 countries. Under private-equity owner Permira since 2024, BioCatch’s revenue and gross profit have roughly tripled. Plugging that capability into Visa’s rails—which link 14,500 financial institutions and handle 329 billion transactions worth $17 trillion a year—gives the tech a far bigger stage.

Evercore analyst Adam Frisch called the deal “long overdue,” noting that many investors saw Mastercard’s Recorded Future as the category leader. Visa counters with cash: the BioCatch buy follows more than $13 billion spent on fraud-fighting tech and infrastructure over the past five years, including the 2024 purchase of Featurespace. Andrew Torre, Visa’s president of value-added services, said BioCatch will let clients block fraud before the payment even happens. That business grew 34% last quarter, the fastest slice of Visa’s revenue.

The closing date remains far off—Visa doesn’t expect the deal to finish until the end of its fiscal second quarter in 2027—so Mastercard’s Recorded Future keeps running ahead for now. On the same day, Mastercard closed its own deal for BVNK, a stablecoin platform, and rolled out new issuer controls for virtual cards, with Citi as the first live bank. Visa still posts wider margins and slightly faster cross-border volume growth, but Mastercard’s value-added services revenue jumped 20% last quarter. Both networks are betting big on acquisitions to stay ahead; regulators must still sign off on the $2.4 billion before the numbers shift.