RELX buys fraud prevention firm ThreatMetrix for $830m
RELX Group has acquired authentication and fraud prevention company ThreatMetrix for $830 million (£580 million). The deal is expected to close in the first half of this year, reports Julie Muhn at Finovate (FinTech Futures‘ sister company).
The California-based company will operate as part of RELX’s Risk & Business Analytics under the LexisNexis Risk Solutions brand. LexisNexis, which offers authentication solutions to fight fraud, has been one of ThreatMetrix’s long-standing partners. LexisNexis leverages ThreatMetrix’s device intelligence solutions in its Risk Defense Platform and is planning further integration of ThreatMetrix’s capabilities in device, email, and social intelligence.
Founded in 2005, ThreatMetrix analyses connections among locations, devices, identity, and threat intelligence, and combines this information with behavioural analytics to identify high risk transactions in real time.
The company is known for its Digital Identity Network that analyses 100 million transactions per day across 35,000 websites from 5,000 customers. This digital identity repository encompasses 1.4 billion unique online identities from 4.5 billion devices in 185 countries.
The Digital Identity Network is likely one of the reasons RELX was enticed to make the acquisition. In fact, the $830 million RELX paid for ThreatMetrix is $593 million higher than Pitchbook’s valuation of ThreatMetrix after the company’s 2014 funding round.
Earlier this month, ThreatMetrix teamed up with GlobalOnePay to power its Sentinel Defend, a fraud detection and scoring engine that protects cross-border transactions.
