BioCatch, a provider of behavioural biometrics, has expanded its presence in Latin America by partnering with seven tier-one banks.
The company is partnering with seven banks based in Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico to protect them against rising cyberattacks, and preventing new account fraud and account takeover.
BioCatch’s behavioral biometrics technology validates users by who they are via their interactions with an online application, rather than by what they know (e.g., passwords or security questions). The system analyses more than 2,000 behavioral profiling metrics during a session to differentiate a genuine user from a human imposter, bot or malware.
Once a user logs onto an online session, the system is able to recognize if the session has been hijacked, generating a risk score that is used by the bank to determine whether to reject a transaction or escalate for further authentication.
“Banks in Latin America face significant challenges coming from data breaches, mobile malware, banking Trojans and other cybercrime threats that are more often than not, homegrown,” said Rodrigo Colossi, IT Superintendent of Brazil’s Itau Unibanco.
“Solutions like BioCatch’s behavioral biometrics technology helps us to manage these threats while enabling a good user experience online, which is very important for us to compete in today’s economy. We have experienced first-hand the significant return on investment that BioCatch provides and this comes from not only catching the fraud that traditional solutions miss, but from reducing the operational costs and lost customer revenue that comes from too much disruption in the digital channel.”
In Latin America alone, BioCatch works with seven top-tier banks, covering over 25 million online and mobile users that collectively process 300 million transactions a month.
Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, BioCatch closed a $30m financing round in March 2018. The round featured investment from Maverick Ventures Israel, Our Crowd, NexStar Partners, Kreos Capital, JANVEST Capital Partners, LLC, CreditEase, American Express Ventures.
Oren Kedem, vice president of Latin America for BioCatch, said: “Latin America is different than other regions in that fraud rates are very high, and the vast majority of cybersecurity attacks originate in the region as opposed to being launched from other parts of the world.
“Fraudsters in Latin America deploy targeted attacks in a homegrown fashion that are not seen elsewhere, which is challenging for traditional cybersecurity providers to keep up with. This cat and mouse game ends with BioCatch technology, which is not reliant on known strains of cyberattacks or other static measures of authentication.”
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