Synchrony Financial, a consumer financial services firm specializing in private label credit cards, has taken a stake in Payfone. The investment was made through Synchrony Ventures, the VC arm of Synchrony Financial.
The latter’s platform is designed to assess a range of contextual information pertaining to end users’ devices and networks as a means of assessing potential fraud threats in digital transactions. It also offers Fonebook, a system designed to tokenize and authenticate digital identity information; and, perhaps most importantly for Synchrony Financial’s purposes, an ‘Identity Pre-Fill’ system that is designed to automatically fill in verified user information for online credit applications.
In a statement announcing the investment, Synchrony Ventures Senior Managing Director Michael Hensinger framed it as an effort “to help accelerate the growth of a company that is at the forefront in providing digital identity authentication solutions,” adding, “Synchrony’s investment in Payfone represents our continuous commitment to provide our partners with fast and easy credit applications and purchasing processes that improve the customer experience.”
Synchrony says its Payfone investment is one of many recent investments the company has made in the mobile and authentication sectors. Terms of the investment were not disclosed, but the companies say it was part of a broader round of investment in Payfone that brought in a total of $23 million in funding.
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