The Boise-based Account will soon have a major new owner. Equifax has announced that it will buy the fraud prevention company for $ 640 million.
“The acquisition of Kount will expand Equifax’s differentiated data assets to provide global businesses with the information and solutions they need to establish identity trust online,” Equifax CEO Mark W. Begor said in a news release. . “Our data and technology cloud investments enable us to quickly and aggressively integrate new data and analytics assets such as Kount into our global capabilities and offer new leading products and solutions to our customers.”
Equifax is known among consumers as one of the three major credit monitoring companies, but it owns a number of other companies in the financial space.
Kount was launched in Boise in 2007 and has grown steadily over the years as a private company. It opened a new headquarters building in Downtown Boise in 2019. Investment firm CVC Capital Partners made a major $ 80 million investment in the company in 2016.
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Kount owns a number of patents and offers products that focus on protecting digital fraud.
Account to stay in Boise
According to Equifax, Kount will retain its headquarters in Boise, and employees will be part of the larger company’s United States Information Solutions group.
“We are excited to offer Kount solutions with a comprehensive set of Equifax data, analytics and products,” said Bradley Wiskirchen, CEO of Kount. “Equifax’s global reach will accelerate the international adoption of Kount, enabling us to help more businesses around the world better protect their digital innovations and their customers from emerging threats, while enhancing the customer experience.”
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Equifax says it hopes to close the deal in the first quarter of this year.
Kount is the latest Boise company to see an acquisition of a larger company. Last fall, Cradlepoint sold its business to Ericcson in a billion-dollar deal. In 2018, TSheets were sold to Intuit. In the case of both of these businesses, the new owner kept large local presence and employees.