Since 2021, finance industry leaders such as Visa and Mastercard have invested billions of dollars acquiring fraud, identity, behavioral biometrics, and threat intelligence companies. These acquisitions signal a fundamental market shift: identity verification, fraud prevention, authentication, and cybersecurity are no longer viewed as separate disciplines. They are increasingly becoming a single, integrated trust infrastructure for digital banking.
For decades prior, financial institutions had approached these as distinct challenges. With different teams managing different tools, and different vendors addressing different threats. That model is rapidly changing – out of sheer necessity.
As digital banking adoption grows and AI-powered threats become more sophisticated, financial institutions need a more connected approach to trust. Fraudsters no longer attack a single point in the customer journey. They exploit vulnerabilities across account opening, authentication, digital banking sessions, payments and account servicing. In fact,
73% of fraud leaders say generative AI has permanently altered the fraud landscape, while new account fraud victims increased 31% year over year, reaching 5.4 million in 2025.
Fragmented point solutions are struggling to keep pace with increasingly coordinated and sophisticated attacks. In response, the industry's largest players are making substantial investments to bring these capabilities together.
The message behind their recent acquisitions is clear: trust has become a strategic asset.
Inviting fraud (prevention) inside: The 7 deals signaling a market shift
Several high-profile acquisitions over the past few years demonstrate just how valuable fraud, identity and security capabilities have become. Here’s just a handful of them below worth noting.
Visa acquires BioCatch for $2.4 billion (2026)
In August 2026, Visa announced plans to acquire behavioral biometrics and fraud intelligence leader BioCatch for $2.4 billion. BioCatch helps financial institutions identify fraud, account takeovers, scams and mule activity using behavioral, device and network intelligence.
The acquisition is significant because it moves fraud prevention earlier in the customer journey. Rather than evaluating risk only at the point of payment, financial institutions can use behavioral intelligence to detect suspicious activity before fraud occurs.
It's a strong indication that behavioral biometrics has become a core component of modern financial security.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions acquires IDVerse for an undisclosed amount (2025)
In 2025, LexisNexis Risk Solutions acquired IDVerse, an AI-powered identity verification provider. Identity verification is rapidly becoming one of the most important control points in fraud prevention. Financial institutions increasingly recognize that preventing fraud starts with establishing trust in who a customer is before an account is opened or a transaction is approved.
This acquisition reflects growing demand for modern identity proofing capabilities that combine speed, convenience and security.
Mastercard acquires Recorded Future for ~$2.65 billion (2024)
Recorded Future provides AI-powered threat intelligence used by enterprises, governments and financial institutions worldwide. By combining Mastercard's expertise in payments, fraud prevention and identity intelligence with Recorded Future's cyber-intelligence capabilities, the company expanded its ability to help organizations anticipate and respond to emerging threats.
The acquisition illustrates the growing convergence between financial crime prevention and cybersecurity.
Visa acquires Featurespace for an estimated $935 million (2024)
Visa also expanded its fraud portfolio through its acquisition of Featurespace in 2024. (Though Visa and Featurespace kept the specific financial terms private in their initial transaction announcements, major financial news outlets like Reuters confirmed the $935 million figure through market sources and shareholder disclosures.) Featurespace specializes in machine learning-powered fraud detection and real-time transaction monitoring used by banks and payment providers globally.
The significance extends beyond fraud detection. The acquisition reinforces a broader industry trend toward AI-driven decisioning that evaluates risk in real time across millions of transactions.
As payment volumes increase and attack methods evolve, machine learning has become an essential defense mechanism rather than a competitive differentiator.
Thoma Bravo acquires ForgeRock for $2.3 billion (2023)
In 2023, Thoma Bravo (one of the largest software investment firms in the world) completed its $2.3 billion acquisition of ForgeRock, a leading provider of identity and access management solutions. Following the transaction, ForgeRock was combined with Ping Identity to create a broader identity security platform focused on authentication, identity orchestration, governance and access management. The significance extends beyond identity management, reflecting a broader trend toward consolidation across the identity and security market.
For banks and credit unions, this shift reinforces the growing importance of identity as a foundational layer of fraud prevention. Modern security strategies are increasingly built around understanding who a user is, validating their intent and continuously assessing risk throughout the customer journey. This acquisition highlights how identity has evolved from a standalone security function into a strategic component of digital trust.
Nasdaq acquires Verafin for $2.75 billion (2021)
In 2021, Nasdaq announced its acquisition of Verafin for $2.75 billion, bringing one of the financial services industry's leading providers of anti-money laundering (AML), fraud detection and financial crime management solutions into its growing risk and regulatory technology portfolio. According to the announcement, the combination was designed to create a stronger global platform for detecting, investigating and preventing financial crime across the banking ecosystem.
Nasdaq's acquisition of Verafin reflects an industry-wide shift toward embedding fraud prevention, AML monitoring and risk intelligence directly into core financial infrastructure. It underscores a broader market reality: preventing financial crime is no longer viewed as a compliance function alone. It has become a strategic capability that helps financial institutions protect customers and members, strengthen trust and support long-term growth.
Mastercard acquires Ekata for $850 million (2021)
Although it predates some of the more recent activity, Mastercard's $850 million acquisition of Ekata remains one of the foundational deals that helped shape today's landscape.
Ekata brought digital identity verification, fraud scoring and risk intelligence capabilities into Mastercard's portfolio. The acquisition signaled an early recognition that digital identity would become central to customer onboarding, authentication and fraud prevention.
In many ways, it helped establish the blueprint that the industry continues to follow today.
What these acquisitions tell us
Each deal addresses a different category, but when viewed collectively, they tell a much larger story. What's even more compelling is that the acquirers are no longer just banks or fintechs.
They're:
- Payment networks
- Financial infrastructure providers
- Risk and analytics firms
- Cybersecurity companies
- Enterprise software vendors
At the same time, the acquisition targets increasingly fall into categories such as:
- Behavioral biometrics
- Identity verification
- Threat intelligence
- AI fraud detection
- Authentication and identity orchestration
What does all this mean? That fraud prevention, authentication, identity, real-time behavioral intelligence, cybersecurity, and risk signals are converging into a unified decisioning layer rather than operating as standalone point solutions. The biggest names in financial services are assembling connected ecosystems that unify all of the above. Because the goal is not simply to stop fraudulent transactions, but to create a continuous understanding of trust throughout the customer lifecycle.
This shift is especially important as generative AI and automated attack tools lower the barriers for bad actors. Financial institutions need solutions that can evaluate context, behavior, device intelligence, transaction risk and identity signals simultaneously.
In short, trust is no longer a feature. It is becoming foundational infrastructure.
Candescent brings enterprise-grade fraud and identity protection to financial institutions of every size
Fortunately, banks and credit unions do not need multibillion-dollar acquisition budgets to benefit from these innovations.
Candescent's cloud-native Intelligent Banking platform helps financial institutions access many of the same advanced fraud, identity and security capabilities through a connected ecosystem of trusted partners.
Amongst others, that ecosystem includes (or will soon include):
- Callsign, which provides session-level and device intelligence to support continuous authentication and account takeover prevention.
- BioCatch, which uses behavioral biometrics to identify anomalous user activity and detect fraud in real time.
- NICE Actimize, which helps financial institutions monitor transactions and identify suspicious activity related to fraud and financial crime.
- Nasdaq Verafin, which helps financial institutions detect and prevent financial crime through cloud-native AML, fraud detection, sanctions screening and investigative analytics.
- Memcyco, which helps organizations strengthen digital trust and combat phishing-based attacks.
- Alloy, which helps financial institutions automate identity verification, fraud decisioning and KYC onboarding through a centralized identity and risk management platform.
- Socure, and other identity-focused partners, which supports identity verification and orchestration throughout the customer lifecycle.
Together, these capabilities help institutions strengthen security, improve customer experiences, reduce friction and make more informed risk decisions. Rather than managing disconnected point solutions, banks and credit unions can benefit from a more integrated approach to trust and protection that is embedded throughout the platform experience.
This is why Candescent treats trust as intelligence and not as a simple point-solution capability or a single control at one moment in the journey. For us, trust becomes intelligence that informs every interaction, every recommendation, and every action across the entire banking relationship – from account opening and onboarding to authentication, payments, servicing, digital banking sessions and beyond – and creates outcomes that matter.
The future of trust is connected
This acquisition activity across the industry is about much more than consolidation. It reflects a growing recognition that trust will define the next generation of digital banking experiences. The organizations leading the market are investing heavily because they understand a simple reality: growth, innovation and customer experience depend on security and trust.
Through Candescent’s Intelligent Banking platform – built on continuous trust, identity-led intelligence, and relationship-level decisioning – those same capabilities are becoming more accessible than ever, without the acquisition budget of a Visa or Mastercard.
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