Dive Brief:
- Mastercard, the No. 2 U.S. card network company, said Monday in a press release that it has purchased Baffin Bay Networks, but a spokesperson for the company declined to say how much it paid for the Sweden-based business.
- The acquisition is aimed at better helping card customers “deal with the increasingly challenging nature of cyber-attacks,” Purchase, New York-based Mastercard said in the release.
- Baffin Bay appears to be a relatively small company, compared to Mastercard, with annual revenue of about $5 million, according to an estimate from Baird Equity Research.
Dive Insight:
Card network companies, including No. 1 Visa, have increasingly added services to their portfolio of offerings to expand the value-added tools, beyond card services, that they can sell their customers.
The Mastercard spokesperson declined to say how many employees Baffin Bay has or whether they’ll be kept on after the merger, though he noted LinkedIn and Crunchbase estimate the company’s headcount at between 11 and 50 workers.
As part of the announcement Monday, Mastercard said it’s in the process of integrating its cyber defenses into a single cyber service that it makes available to all its customers.
“Today’s increasingly digital world has delivered greater convenience and increased opportunities for people, businesses and governments,” Mastercard said in the release. “At the same time, it has exposed the need to strengthen protection against criminals who exploit this technology through malware, ransomware and distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.” Mastercard noted DDOS incursions rose 22% last year.
Baffin Bay’s automated service uses cloud-based artificial intelligence filtering of internet traffic to spot malicious attack attempts and stop the attackers from taking down systems, the release said.
