Visa is buying BioCatch for $2.4 billion because AI scams now cost the global economy $1 trillion a year

Visa is acquiring Tel Aviv-based fraud detection startup BioCatch for $2.4 billion in cash from private equity firm Permira and other investors. BioCatch’s platform analyses keystroke timing, touchscreen pressure, swipe patterns, and device handling to distinguish real users from scammers and bots. The company currently protects 760 million users across roughly 350 banks. Visa processes over 329 billion transactions annually worth more than $17 trillion.

Visa estimates that scams and account takeovers cost the global economy more than $1 trillion annually, and generative AI is making attacks cheaper and more convincing. “BioCatch will help our clients stop fraud before it reaches the point of payment,” said Andrew Torre, Visa’s president of value-added services. The acquisition expands Visa’s value-added services division, which sells fraud prevention, cybersecurity, and analytics software and has become one of the company’s fastest-growing businesses.

BioCatch acknowledged the scale of the problem in a blog post: “As a society and industry, we are not winning this fight. The value of fraud and scam losses and the number of fraud and scam attempts, mule accounts, and victims of these financial crimes all continue to grow, in some cases exponentially, every year.” Deepfake-enabled fraud has risen 3,000% since 2023, and behavioral biometrics, which verify identity by how someone interacts with a device rather than what they know or possess, is one of the few defences that scales against AI-generated attacks.

The deal is expected to close by the end of Visa’s fiscal second quarter in 2027, subject to regulatory approvals. Straiker raised $64M for agentic AI security, and the broader security market is consolidating around the premise that AI-powered offence requires AI-powered defence. Visa’s $2.4 billion is the largest bet yet that fraud prevention belongs inside the payment rail, not beside it.