PayPal completes their fifth acquisition in the past 12 months, this time purchasing machine learning fraud prevention provider Simility for $120 million. PayPal COO Bill Ready says each of these five recent acquisitions are part of the company’s effort to strengthen the services they provide to merchants.
Simility was founded in 2014, they are based in Palo Alto and provide advanced risk analytic and modeling solutions for fraud prevention in the Customer Not Present (CNP) channel. Major clients include eBay/StubHub, Dick’s Sporting Goods and OfferUp. The fraud prevention provider had previously raised $25 million, including PayPal as one of their early investors.
PayPal stated they completed the acquisition of Simility in July, after initially announcing the acquisition in late June, 2018. Simility will continue to offer their services directly to merchants and financial institutions, while PayPal will integrate these risk management solutions to provide to their merchant client base.
“PayPal has been at the forefront of developing innovative fraud prevention and risk management solutions for nearly 20 years, but until now, merchants haven’t been able to configure those solutions to manage the unique complexities of their businesses,” said Bill Ready, PayPal’s Chief Operating Officer, adding that the acquisition of Simility will enable PayPal “to put more control in the hands of our merchants to fight fraud.”
The $120 million acquisition of Simility follows PayPal’s purchases of iZettle for $2.2 billion, Hyperwallet for $400 million, Swift Financial for $183 million and Jetlore (undisclosed).
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