Visa Takes on Scammers & Weyerhaeuser Branches Out into AI

**John** (0:00)
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**Ann Berry** (0:31)
It's just another Merger Monday with a possible tie up of two major pharmaceutical companies. We dig into why the potential deal has one analyst perplexed. Weyerhaeuser, the century old timber company is looking to get into data centers. Literally, we have the latest. And Visa, fighting AI powered scams with a $2.4 billion corporate acquisition that comes with a treasure trove of biometric data. We break it all down. For Monday, August 3rd, it's Brew Markets Daily and I'm Ann Berry.
More market details to come, but first, Visa. The more than $680 billion market cap payments OG kicking off the week with the purchase of BioCatch. Visa announced today it's buying the Tel Aviv based fraud intelligence company in a cash deal of about $2.4 billion.
The acquisition comes as banks and payment companies face a surge in increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks and AI-powered scams. BioCatch may not be a household name, but chances are its technology is already helping to protect your money. Which is really why this deal caught our eye. The company uses something called behavioral biometrics to analyse how people interact with their devices, everything from typing patterns and mouse movements to touch screen gestures. And uses this data, along of course with AI, to help determine whether it's really you making a transaction, or if it's a bot, or if it's a criminal who has stolen your credentials. Well, according to Visa, BioCatch's technology is already used by more than 350 financial institutions in 21 countries. Protecting, or you could say tracking, roughly 760 million users across a whopping 1.8 billion devices. Well, by bringing all of those capabilities in house, not to mention that treasure trove of data, Visa hopes to detect fraud earlier and strengthen security across its global payments network. Mastercard made a similar move with its acquisition of cyber intelligence firm Recorded Future about two years ago, and a pretty similar price tag that was just over $2.6 billion.
And when you look at the need for this, the reason for all the activity is pretty clear. Payment card fraud losses across the entire global ecosystem reach more than $30 billion each year. And what's interesting is that Visa and Mastercard as corporate entities don't actually absorb the vast majority of those losses directly. The ones who suffer are the merchants and the card-issuing banks and financial institutions on their platforms. Plus, of course, the consumers who actually have those cards get the loss of time and energy that they have to work through when they get hit too. So from Visa's point of view, the BioCatch deal is really a commercial move to expand one of its divisions, and that's its value-added services business. It sells fraud prevention, cybersecurity and analytics software to financial institutions. And as PurePlay payments, its core business has become more competitive. This value-added services division has become one of the company's fastest growing, hitting 20% compound annual growth since 2021 to reach revenue last year of $11 billion.
While investors giving a sort of thumbs up on this deal today, Visa stocks started up on the news and bumped on down, coming in towards the end of the day flat, but overall the thesis intact. Coming up in a moment, a spin through the headlines that are moving the markets today, including earnings out of Tyson Foods and Nissan. But first, this episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab.

**John** (4:07)
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**Ann Berry** (4:29)
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**John** (4:38)
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**Ann Berry** (4:45)
Let's take a quick spin through some of the headlines that are moving the markets today, starting with another potential Monday merger moment.

**John** (4:54)
That's right, UK based AstraZeneca is reportedly in talks to combine with US pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb. If the deal comes together, it would be one of the largest pharmaceutical mergers ever. The resulting company would have a combined value of nearly $400 billion and it would create the world's fourth largest drug maker.