Proximus acquires American company mobile authentication services

For its subsidiary BICS, Proximus acquires TeleSign, an American provider of mobile verification and authentication services. TeleSign’s customers include Tinder, Evernote and SalesForce. Proximus pays 230 million dollars for TeleSign.

The acquisition is intended to broaden the range of BICS. BICS is Proximus’ international subsidiary, which focuses on wholesale, connectivity and interoperability services. With the acquisition of TeleSign, the company aims to bring in-house expertise in the field of real-time and secure digital communication.

TeleSign offers various APIs in the field of authentication and verification. Examples are the SMS Verify and Voice Verify APIs for two-step authentication via successively SMS and voice pass codes. The company also has an API that assigns scores to mobile numbers, based on the analysis of internet traffic via machine learning, among other things. For example, Tinder uses the APIs to prevent spam accounts.

TeleSign has more than 500 customers in the social networking, gaming, e-commerce, software and communications sectors. The turnover in 2016 was about $100 million. With an acquisition amount of USD 230 million, it is Proximus’ largest acquisition since that of Telindus.