Portuguese unicorn Feedzai buys Revelock

Portuguese technology company Feedzai announces today the purchase of the biometric platform Revelock, a promising startup based in Madrid that specializes in pre-transaction behavioral analysis to prevent financial crimes in real-time. This is the first acquisition of the Portuguese unicorn after the 200 million dollares financing round at the beginning of the year, and the value of the deal was not disclosed.

Characterizing Revelock as "the most advanced behavioral biometric platform in the world", Feedzai explains that the addition of the technology will allow it to create the largest Financial Intelligence Network globally.

"The goal has always been to make digital commerce safe for everyone. Adding Revelock technology to our customers' arsenal changes the paradigm", said the CEO Nuno Sebastião. "Feedzai already assured transactions in real-time, now we are talking about acting in the pre-transaction phase, where it is possible to effectively predict and prevent a financial crime even before it happens."

The premise is that combining Feedzai's artificial intelligence technologies and Revelock's biometric intelligence will create an advanced network with more than a trillion data points, sessions, and user profiles. Feedzai has the technology, Segment-of-One profiling, which uses 150 billion data points to decide whether the transaction is fraudulent or not.

Revelock adds the biometric intelligence of every user, device, and session connected to the system. With the purchase of the Spanish company, Feedzai adds behavioral biometric data to its platform and aggregates information enriched in models that create predictive intelligence.

Revelock's anonymous hyper granular profiles, explained the CEO Pablo de la Riva, allow the system to detect the most subtle changes in user behavior. For example, it can identify differences in how someone holds their phone, how quickly they navigate a banking application, or how they type in their password. From there, the system predicts whether a particular session is trustworthy or not.

"We built Revelock to help global commerce identify if someone is really who they say they are when they're transacting online," said De la Riva.

The business is particularly relevant at a time when digitization is accelerating due to the covid-19 pandemic: many businesses have had to migrate to digital contactless payments, cashless commerce has grown and many consumers have migrated to online banking and commerce. This reality has made the risks of financial crimes and the increased risk burden for banks, payment processors, and merchants, who are the customers served by Feedzai, more pressing.

"More than 20% of the world's money flows through Feedzai, and we guarantee the bank accounts of one in five people", continued Nuno Sebastião. "We already knew the transactional contexts of 800 million consumers, but now, with Revelock, we've added critical process intelligence to know how the transaction takes place." The result, said the CEO, is that the customer experience will become faster, more private, and more secure.