Visa Reportedly Weighing $925 Million Featurespace Acquisition

Visa is reportedly considering a multimillion-dollar bid for fraud-prevention firm Featurespace.

The payments giant is in advanced talks about a possible sale, Sky News reported Saturday (Aug. 24), citing unnamed sources. One source said the deal could be worth as much as $925 million, while another said the value could be markedly less.

The report notes that Featurespace — whose clients include HSBC, NatWest Group and Worldpay — has seen demand for its services balloon amid rising financial scams. The company makes Adaptive Behavioral Analytics software, which uses machine learning (ML) to spot and prevent fraud in upwards of 180 countries.

PYMNTS has contacted both companies for comment but has not yet gotten a reply from either one.

The Sky News report notes Featurespace’s ties to the late tech investor Mike Lynch, who died last week when his superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily. Featurespace paid tribute to Lynch late last week on its website.

“It is a high statistical probability that Featurespace wouldn’t be a thriving technology company without Mike,” the company wrote.

“Our co-founders, Professor Bill Fitzgerald and Dave Excell, were inspired by Mike’s combination of intellect and commercial acumen. They benefited from his friendship and guidance. Mike’s personal investment in Featurespace supported the development of an invention that has proved fundamental in the progress of AI and he served as a Non-Executive Director for over 10 years from 2008 – 2019.”

PYMNTS spoke with Excell last month about the prevalence of financial scams, which have been helped along by new tools available to bad actors.

“Unfortunately, the amount of scams and the prevalence of them has continued to increase, as there are new tools available to scammers … to victimize vulnerable populations,” he told Karen Webster in an interview for the “What’s Next In Payments” series.

Featurespace, Excell added, is addressing several scams with its solutions. Among these are job-related scams, which have risen 118% year over year, according to data from the Identity Theft Resource Center. These scams often prey on job hunters by pretending to be legitimate employment agencies or recruiters.

To help banks deal with the growing threat, Featurespace debuted a product called Scam Detect. Based on the concept of data sharing, it lets financial institutions use the information they already have more effectively by consolidating it into a unique piece of intelligence that can track and verify both the funds that are leaving and coming into the institution.