Visa to acquire fraud detector BioCatch for $2.4 billion to fight AI-driven scams

Visa said on August 3, 2026 that it agreed to acquire BioCatch, a Tel Aviv-based behavioral-biometrics fraud detection company, for $2.4 billion in cash. It is buying the company from funds advised by Permira and other shareholders.

The deal targets a fast-growing problem: fraud that uses AI to mimic real users and defeat conventional defenses. ‘AI is enabling these attacks at unprecedented scale,’ said Andrew Torre, Visa’s president of value-added services. Visa said scams and account takeovers cost the global economy more than $1 trillion a year.

BioCatch tries to catch that behavior at the point of use. Rather than checking passwords or device fingerprints alone, its software analyzes signals such as keystroke rhythm, touch gestures and how a person physically handles a device, then scores each session for fraud in real time. The company says its technology covers 1.8 billion devices and 760 million users across more than 350 banking clients in 21 countries, and analyzes 19 billion sessions a month. Those figures are BioCatch’s own and were not independently verified.

For Visa, the acquisition extends a push beyond card processing into security and identity services it can sell to banks. Behavioral biometrics is meant to flag an account takeover or a scam in progress even when the attacker has valid credentials, the kind of case that AI-assisted social engineering makes more common.

The transaction is expected to close in Visa’s fiscal second quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approval. Whether it clears on that timeline, and how regulators view Visa absorbing another piece of the payments-security stack, will shape how quickly the two are combined.