Final week, Visa introduced the acquisition of Featurespace, a UK-based enterprise fraud administration and anti-money-laundering (AML) vendor. Forrester estimates the acquisition worth to be between $350–450 million. Based in 2008, Featurespace employs over 400 folks. The transfer comes as a little bit of shock, since Visa’s Cybersource answer already addresses e-commerce and retail fraud administration/digital fraud administration use circumstances. Cybersource has been utilizing guidelines and machine learning-based fashions for danger scoring and has in depth alert and case routing and investigation options. This implies the Featurespace acquisition brings in considerably overlapping know-how for Visa.
Forrester expects that the success of the acquisition will depend upon the next elements, specifically Visa’s skill and execution to:
- Converge the Cybersource and Featurespace options’ mental property. Whereas it could look viable to take care of two separate know-how stacks within the two portfolios, this implies duplicating engineering, advertising and marketing, and gross sales efforts, which isn’t environment friendly and may end up in the erosion of Visa’s aggressive place towards different fraud administration and AML distributors.
- Present convincing fraud administration and AML cyber/on-line and transaction monitoring capabilities. Cybersource has targeted on detecting merchant-side fee transaction fraud (e.g., fraudsters utilizing stolen bank card numbers on a service provider’s web site or fraudsters taking up professional customers’ on-line accounts on e-commerce web sites), whereas Featurespace has specialised in detecting issuer bank-side fee fraud and providing some cyber/on-line (account takeover, fraudulent registration) fraud detection capabilities. Featurespace has additionally entered the AML house, with a give attention to transaction monitoring. Visa, with its Featurespace acquisition, must assemble its belongings to supply end-to-end (i.e., cyber/on-line and transaction monitoring) fraud administration that covers scams, new account fraud, and peer-to-peer funds.
- Supply financial institution/issuer-facing and e-commerce-facing fraud administration instruments. Fraud administration remains to be an industry-specific product market. Distributors more and more present extra than simply risk-scoring rule administration and machine studying; alert and case administration; and reporting capabilities for fraud administration but additionally usher in a wealth of fraud domain-level information (i.e., fashions educated to detect typical fraud patterns resembling account takeover, extreme funds, mule actions, or scams), particularly given right now’s transition from on-premises to SaaS-delivered fraud administration options. Consequently, Visa wants to make use of its entry to fee community, issuer (Featurespace), and merchant-side (Cybersource) knowledge to supply highly effective options to issuers/banks and e-commerce verticals.
Fraud administration continues to be a quickly evolving market. I like to recommend studying my analysis, The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Fraud Administration Options, Q2 2024, or scheduling a steering session or inquiry with me to debate the present state of fraud administration.
