It’s the end of an era for ThreatMetrix. The authentication and fraud prevention company has been acquired by RELX Group for $830 million (£580 million). The deal is expected to close in the first half of this year.
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.
ThreatMetrix President and CEO Reed Taussig said that the previous partnership exemplifies “strong synergies” between the two organizations. Taussig added, “The benefits our shared customers have realized from the integration of our respective products are unmatched in the industry…. by combining the strength of LexisNexis Risk Solutions and ThreatMetrix into a single business, our customers, partners, and employees will benefit with a unique and compelling market opportunity.”
Founded in 2005, ThreatMetrix analyzes connections among locations, devices, identity, and threat intelligence, and combines this information with behavioral analytics to identify high risk transactions in real time. The company is known for its Digital Identity Network that analyzes 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.
ThreatMetrix launched its Digital Identity Graph, which leverages information from the Digital Identity Network, at FinovateAsia 2016. The Digital Identity Graph gathers information on billions of transactions collected from tens of thousands of websites to build a user’s digital identity by analyzing connections between the user, their locations, behaviors, and devices. At FinovateSpring 2017, the company’s CTO, Andreas Baumhof, and Sr. Director of Product Management, Dean Weinert, launched SmartAuthentication for banks with multiple authentication methods. Earlier this month, ThreatMetrix teamed up with GlobalOnePay to power its Sentinel Defend, a fraud detection and scoring engine that protects cross-border transactions.
