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Writer's pictureFraud Practice

LexisNexis Makes Two Major Risk & Identity Acquisitions in First Two Months of 2020

LexisNexis prepares to fund two acquisitions totaling $855 million as parent company RELX looks to buy two major names in the identity authentication and risk management space. This includes the acquisition of ID Analytics from NortonLifeLock in January followed by the purchase of email authentication vendor Emailage, announced in mid-February. Both deals are expected to close in the first quarter of this year.


LexisNexis Risk Solutions offers a plethora of identity and risk services across online retail, financial services, government, health care, insurance and law enforcement industries. The strategic acquisitions of Emailage and ID Analytics will complement and supplement these service offerings in terms of identity authentication and management while ID Analytics provides credit risk data and analytics assets as well. To provide an idea of the breadth and scale of their services, LexisNexis processes nearly 40 billion transactions per year across their Digital Identity Network.


LexisNexis is purchasing ID Analytics from NortonLifeLock for $375 million, part of a continuing effort of the anti-virus and identity theft protection company to divest enterprise business lines and focus more on the consumer. The company formerly known as Symantec acquired LifeLock in 2016, which included ID Analytics whom LifeLock acquired in 2012. Symantec later re-branded to NortonLifeLock and in November 2019 sold the Symantec enterprise security business to Broadcom for $10.7 billion. Although a much smaller deal, selling ID Analytics follows that strategy of divesting business or enterprise service lines to put more emphasis on consumer-facing products and services. ID Analytics will continue to provide NortonLifeLock with identity fraud alerts as part of the deal.


The deal seems to be a win for both parties as LexisNexis beefs up their identity and credit risk analytics offerings, while NortonLifeLock more than triples the value of ID Analytics over a period of less than eight years. Terms of the 2012 LifeLock-ID Analytics acquisition were undisclosed, but industry pundits estimated the transaction to be $120 million.


LexisNexis announced the planned acquisition of Emailage for $480 million less than one month later, a company with whom they had already established a partnership. Emailage was founded in 2012, the same year LifeLock acquired ID Analytics, and focuses on identity authentication lookups around the email address. Emailage builds multi-dimensional profiles associated with email addresses based on proprietary data, data sharing and using data analytics to provide an email risk score.


In a press release, LexisNexis Risk Solutions Business Services CEO Rick Trainor said “Emailage’s broad email and digital data attributes network, inquiry data and confirmed fraud feedback complement [LexisNexis’] deep expertise in contributory data management and linking technology.” He then went on to say how this strategic acquisition will strengthen the company’s identity and fraud prevention services.


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