Nice Systems Ltd., an Israeli company that monitors customer interactions across channels, plans to expand into fraud detection by buying Actimize Inc. of New York.
Nice announced the $280 million deal to purchase Actimize on Monday.
Amir Orad, Actimize's chief marketing officer and executive vice president, said in an interview that the two companies already were working together, and that the acquisition would let them transform their products by combining them.
At Nice, "they capture and analyze client interactions," Mr. Orad said. "We at Actimize look at transactions, money moving around."
Though the companies have complementary products, generally they are treated as separate tools by their clients, he said. "There is no overlap in the products. It's not one fraud company buying another fraud company. It's not one security company buying another security company."
Nice, which serves 24,000 banks and government agencies, examines the tone and wording of customer interactions across various channels. It can, for example, look for mentions of certain stocks to detect insider trading.
Actimize looks at specific transactions to detect fraud and money laundering. Nice was looking to expand into that business, and "as they developed it, they found out that they can capture this market and be much more aggressive if they acquired the talent pool," Mr. Orad said.
Though one goal of the acquisition would be to expand Nice's offerings, he said its data can be used to improve Actimize fraud-detection capabilities. The companies currently cannot share such data, he said.
Nice's data would let Actimize look at the context of things such as password changes to determine whether the customer requested it. For example, if a password change was requested by phone, Actimize would be able to determine whether the caller provided proper authentication or persuaded the bank employee to change the password without providing the proper credentials.
"There is a lot of data out there in the interaction cloud that we can now leverage," Mr. Orad said.
The deal is expected to close this quarter.
