Having established itself as a leading digital identity company provider, Payfone has secured $100m in new funding round and is looking to grow on the back of the investment round.
More precisely, it said it would use the money to acquire strategic assets, further strengthen its machine learning capabilities, and build a cross-industry consortium to secure digital transactions and experiences.
The investment was led by funds advised by Apax Digital, the growth equity team of Apax Partners. New investors Sandbox Insurtech Ventures and Ralph de la Vega, the former vice chairman of AT&T also joined the raise as did existing investors MassMutual Ventures, Synchrony, Blue Venture Fund, Wellington Management and the former CEO of LexisNexis Andrew Prozes.
Payfone’s customer identity platform already provides secure digital experiences for clients in the banking, insurance, telecommunication, retail, and healthcare sectors.
Its Trust Score tool is developed to measure how safe a phone is by detecting burner phones, spoofed calls, real-time SIM swap fraud, and synthetic identities, while removing friction from legitimate transactions. Payfone also provides call verification solutions that run passively in the background of a phone call, allowing faster issue resolution.
“The mobile phone is rapidly becoming the secure passport for navigating our digital lives,” said Rodger Desai, CEO of Payfone. “With one in three US consumers already authenticated by Payfone, this investment accelerates our ability to set the standard for the authentication process. As we build out a cross-industry consortium, more enterprises will be able to access Payfone’s real-time fraud and risk signals to prevent account takeovers while passing more transactions.”
Daniel O’Keefe, managing partner of Apax Digital said, “Identity is the key enabling technology for the next generation of digital businesses. Payfone’s Trust Score is core to the real-time decisioning that enterprises need in order to drive revenue while thwarting fraud and protecting privacy.”
Copyright © 2018 RegTech Analyst
