Paris, November 18, 2021 - Paris-based cybersecurity company Evina, which operates in 70 countries, has announced a €20 million funding round to consolidate its leading position in securing financial services for telecom operators.
Financial services are the future of telecom operators
The future of telecom operators will not be determined by the sales strategy of cell phone plans, but by the ability to provide new services to the huge customer bases they have patiently built up. Among these, financial services are the most crucial.
The financial services offered by telecom operators today not only offer the possibility to buy digital content, mobile applications or subscriptions to major streaming platforms directly via their SIM card, but also to receive, withdraw and transfer money. The aim is both to offer a highly efficient one-click payment method with conversion rates 100 times higher than those of a bank card, and to replace and compensate for the absence of basic banking services. Especially at a time when there are more smartphones than people on earth, and 2 billion people do not have a bank account.
Today, nearly 20% of global digital content purchases go through operators. By 2021, this will be worth more than $40 billion, with double-digit annual growth. In addition, more than $2.5 trillion is flowing through operators’ e-wallets. This amount is expected to double within 5 years.
The financial services offered by operators are so successful that they have inevitably attracted organized crime from around the world. “All the criminal organizations in the world are converging on cybercrime,” warns Guillaume Poupard, the Director General of the French National Agency for Information Systems Security.
It is to face this challenge that Evina was founded in 2018 by a team of hackers, cybersecurity researchers and financial services specialists who have worked for more than 15 years in the sector they protect.
More than $1 billion saved in the last 12 months by Evina for ecosystem players
David Lotfi, CEO and founder of Evina explains how it all started: “We realized that no one knew how to stop this new generation of cybercriminals, who are extremely professional and have much more advanced technical and financial resources than before. We saw this as a major threat and decided to develop a dedicated solution. Very quickly, the largest operators around the world asked to implement our solutions.”
Evina is now present in over 70 countries. It protects the world’s largest telecom groups such as Orange and Vodacom, but also major digital merchants for whom control of operator payment is a strategic advantage. With a detection rate of 99.94% of false transactions and a false positive rate of less than 0.06%, Evina has prevented the theft of more than 1 billion euros over the last 12 months.
In recognition of its solution, Evina has received all the industry’s leading awards over the past two years, including the Global Carrier Billing Summit award for the best anti-fraud solution in 2020 and 2021 and the Juniper Award for the best financial transaction security solution in 2021.
Confidence in Evina and in the industry’s potential from US funds and historical investors
The €20 million fundraising will allow Evina to accelerate its commercial presence outside Europe, with the opening of offices abroad, and to strengthen its technical team with new talent, in order to consolidate its position as a leader in the world of financial services for telecom operators.
The round was led by New York-based Radian Capital with the support of Evina’s historical investors including 50 partners, SaaS Partners and Id4 ventures.
“Telecom Operators are in a very strong position to offer the next generation of financial service products. And while they currently possess much of what they need – embedded customer base, access to phones, known identities, financial performance, and bank account credentials – these operators still lack the security capabilities necessary to fight the most sophisticated fraud attempts. This is why we are so excited to back the team at Evina. They bring ‘bank security’ capabilities to these Telcos that allows them to operate in 2021 and beyond.” enthused Jordan Bettman, founder of Radian Capital.