Visa’s announced it will acquire fraud-intelligence company BioCatch for $2.4 billion.
Announced on 3 August 2026, the deal will bring BioCatch’s behavioural and device intelligence into Visa’s existing fraud, risk, security and cyber products. Visa expects the transaction to close by the end of its fiscal second quarter in 2027, subject to regulatory approval and other closing conditions.
What BioCatch brings to Visa
BioCatch specialises in behavioural fraud detection. Instead of looking only at what a customer is buying or how much money is being transferred, its technology looks at how the customer behaves during a digital session.
This can include signals such as keystrokes, touch gestures, device handling and other patterns of online behaviour. BioCatch uses these signals to identify whether the person using an account is likely to be the real customer or a fraudster. The company says its technology can analyse more than 3,000 behavioural and device data points in real time.
That matters because many modern scams do not look like traditional fraud. A stolen card can be blocked because the transaction may look unusual. But an authorised payment made by a customer who has been tricked by a scammer can look completely normal.
The customer may be using their own device, logging into their own account and sending money from their own account, but someone else may be controlling or influencing what they are doing.
Visa’s own research shows the scale of this challenge. In its Spring 2026 Biannual Threats Report, Visa said it identified nearly $1 billion in scam-related activity between July and December 2025. Scams were the largest category of consumer payment fraud during that period. Unlike many traditional attacks, these scams often do not require criminals to break into a payment system. Instead, criminals persuade people to make legitimate-looking transactions themselves.
Moving fraud prevention upstream
The most important part of the BioCatch deal may be Visa’s stated aim of stopping fraud before it reaches the payment stage.
Visa already has a large fraud and security operation. The company said it has invested more than $13 billion in technology and infrastructure over the past five years to protect the payments system. It has also developed AI-based tools to detect and prevent fraudulent activity.
The goal is not simply to block more payments. It is to make better decisions about which payments should proceed and which should receive additional checks.
Excessive fraud controls can ruin the customer experience. If legitimate customers are repeatedly asked to verify themselves or have normal payments rejected, they may become frustrated and move to another provider. Effective fraud technology therefore needs to improve security without creating too much friction.
Why speed makes the problem harder
The growth of instant payments makes this balance more difficult.
Traditional payment systems can sometimes provide time for a bank to review a suspicious transaction. With instant payments, that time can disappear. Once funds have moved between accounts, recovering them can be difficult.
A 2026 BIS paper on payment fraud argues that fraud prevention needs to happen before money moves, including through payment pre-validation and tools such as confirmation of the payee. The wider message is that payment security must keep pace with payment speed.
This creates a new technology race. Payment providers need to make decisions in milliseconds while dealing with increasingly complex forms of fraud.
Artificial intelligence changes the threat
AI makes this challenge even more serious.
Criminals can use AI to create more convincing messages, automate attacks and make scams easier to run at scale. This means fraudsters can adapt more quickly, while traditional rules-based systems may struggle to keep up.
Visa has described account takeovers and scams as costing the global economy more than $1 trillion each year, while saying AI is allowing these attacks to operate at greater scale.
At the same time, AI is becoming an important part of the defence. Financial institutions can use machine learning and behavioural analysis to identify patterns that may be difficult for simple rules to detect.
Visa is not alone
Mastercard has been following a similar path. In 2024, it agreed to acquire cyber-threat intelligence company Recorded Future for $2.65 billion. In November 2025, Mastercard introduced Mastercard Threat Intelligence, combining its payment data with intelligence from Recorded Future to help financial institutions detect payment fraud earlier.
Visa has also been expanding its fraud technology portfolio through acquisitions. Its purchase of Featurespace in 2024 added AI-based technology focused on fraud and financial crime detection. The BioCatch transaction takes that strategy further by adding more behavioural and device intelligence.
What the deal means for the payments industry
When money can move in seconds, fraud detection also needs to work in real time.
Visa’s investment shows that payment networks increasingly see fraud intelligence as a competitive advantage. The ability to provide safe and fast payments can become just as important as the ability to provide fast payments alone.
For banks and fintechs, this means fraud technology can no longer be treated only as a back-office cost. It is becoming part of the customer proposition. Customers want payments to be quick, but they also want to know that their money is safe.
