Visa has struck a deal to acquire fraud-intelligence provider BioCatch for US$2.4bn, its latest move to broaden a cybersecurity arsenal under strain as AI makes financial scams more sophisticated. The transaction underlines how seriously the payments industry now treats behaviour-based defence.

Account takeovers and fraudulent schemes drain more than US$1tn from the global economy each year, according to Andrew Torre, President of Value-Added Services at Visa. He argues that AI is powering these attacks at an unprecedented scale, and that BioCatch's role is to help Visa's clients halt fraud before it ever reaches the point of payment.

What Visa is buying

BioCatch brings scale and a decade-plus track record in behavioural intelligence to Visa's expanding security stack.

Founded in 2011, the company serves more than 350 banking clients across 21 countries, with a platform that safeguards 1.8 billion devices and 760 million users worldwide. The deal is set to close by the end of Visa's fiscal second quarter of 2027. Private equity firm Permira first backed BioCatch in 2023 and took a majority stake the following year at a US$1.3bn valuation — a period during which the company roughly tripled both its revenue and gross profit.

Mounting pressure from AI-driven scams

The acquisition arrives against a backdrop of research showing that AI is blurring the line between legitimate digital activity and criminal manipulation.

A BioCatch report on digital trust and the speed of AI-enabled financial crime lays out how rapidly that boundary is eroding. UK banks, in particular, are contending with scams, mule accounts and elaborate social-engineering attacks, all under mandatory reimbursement rules for authorised push payment fraud. Among 80 UK fraud, financial-crime, risk and compliance professionals surveyed, 84% said AI had increased scam sophistication, and 75% expected it to become very difficult to tell legitimate AI-assisted banking from malicious activity. That strain is already operational: 73% reported more fraud attempts at their organisation, and 64% confirmed rising overall losses. Three-quarters said real-time intelligence on receiving accounts would meaningfully sharpen detection.

Jonathan Frost, who leads Global Advisory for EMEA at BioCatch, warns that agentic AI is making fraud faster, more scalable and harder to detect, and urges UK banks to prioritise prevention early in the payment process. Strong reimbursement rules protect victims after the fact, he notes, but they neither spare people the emotional harm nor disrupt the mule accounts and criminal profits behind the fraud. Sector-wide behavioural insight in real time, in his view, remains essential to spotting manipulation and breaking up mule networks.

A global picture of escalating losses

The UK findings sit within a much larger global study that reinforces the same trajectory on a wider canvas.

BioCatch's broader research surveyed 1,440 fraud, anti-money-laundering and compliance leaders across 25 countries, all at manager level or above, with 79% at director level or higher and 23% in the C-suite. Globally, 88% said AI had already heightened fraud sophistication, and 84% viewed AI agents as the industry's most exploitable vulnerability over the coming year. The share reporting more fraud attempts rose to 81% in 2026, while those citing higher year-over-year losses climbed from 59% to 76%. Nearly half of the organisations surveyed lose more than US$10m a year to fraud; 20% lose over US$25m, and 5% exceed US$50m.

As interactions grow faster, more automated and increasingly agent-driven, defence has to move past static identity checks toward an immediate reading of behaviour, intent and trust. — Gadi Mazor, CEO, BioCatch

Card networks race to buy cyber intelligence

Visa's move fits a clear pattern of major card networks absorbing specialist threat-intelligence businesses.

Over the past five years, Visa has poured more than US$13bn into technology and infrastructure aimed at fraudsters, including its 2024 purchase of payment-protection firm Featurespace. Rival Mastercard closed a US$2.65bn acquisition of threat-intelligence company Recorded Future the same year. Visa frames the BioCatch deal as a way to better support clients navigating an increasingly complex threat environment — and, more broadly, as evidence that behavioural defence has become a strategic priority rather than an add-on.