Refinitiv, a global risk intelligence firm, has agreed to buy
“Giact brings us customers we don’t have today and enables us to offer a combination of capabilities available for the first time on a global scale,” James Mirfin, Refinitiv’s global head of digital identity and financial crime propositions, said in an interview.
Giact has about 1,000 customers, mostly in the U.S., including Citibank, PNC and the American Red Cross, among others, for whom it provides a range of services in payment and identity verification and authentication through a set of APIs.
Refinitiv has about 40,000 customers and operates in 170 markets, with many of the largest banks in the world tapping its risk intelligence across many product sets. World-Check and World-Check One are two of its core products.
Giact will continue its operations in Texas with its current CEO and co-founder, Melissa Townsley-Solis, working in close collaboration with Refinitiv through its offices in London and New York.
“We’re looking forward to taking Giact global, and working with Refinitiv, we can address changing security issues as payments become increasingly more digital and processors are now moving faster with better funding,” Townsley-Solis said.
Townsley-Solis founded the company with her brother Merlin, currently chief product officer, when both had logged years working in various technology jobs and saw a chance to enter the emergent identity-verification market.
"We saw an opportunity to help corporations verify customers and I went out and sold our first client before Merlin had even finished developing the product," Townsley-Solis said.
Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close before the end of the year, were not disclosed.
