With a career spanning over two decades at the forefront of financial services, Raj Dasgupta, VP of Product Marketing at BioCatch, has witnessed the fraud landscape transform from a containable nuisance into a complex, global battleground. His work places him at the intersection of human behavior and artificial intelligence, where the subtle tremor of a hand or a moment’s hesitation can betray a criminal’s intent. In our conversation, we explored the sophisticated technology that distinguishes between a customer’s bad day and a meticulously planned account takeover. Dasgupta shed light on the strategies that propelled BioCatch to “centaur” status, the critical role of a multi-disciplinary team in outsmarting fraudsters, and how a threat detected in one corner of the world can instantly fortify defenses for millions of users on the other side of the planet.
With over 20 years in financial services, you have a unique perspective on the industry’s evolution. How have the challenges of fraud prevention you witnessed at firms like HSBC or TransUnion shaped your current product marketing strategy? Could you walk me through your process?
My time at those institutions gave me a front-row seat to the constant tug-of-war between security and user experience. You can’t just throw up walls; you’ll frustrate and lose genuine customers. I saw firsthand how critical it is to operationalize technology to solve these real-world business challenges. My passion has always been at that intersection of business and technology. At BioCatch, this experience directly informs my strategy. I engage constantly with financial institutions of all sizes to truly understand their pain points. It’s not about selling a product; it’s about guiding them on how to leverage our technology to stop bad actors while making the digital journey feel completely seamless and safe for their actual users.
Your “Connect” platform analyzes billions of user sessions monthly using behavioral signals. Can you explain how this technology distinguishes between a legitimate user having an off day and a criminal attempting to take over an account? What are the key metrics you monitor during a session?
That’s the magic of behavioral intelligence, and it’s truly in our DNA. Our Connect platform is the engine that collects, synthesizes, and analyzes an incredible amount of data—we’re talking over 16 billion user sessions a month. It’s not just looking at one thing. We’re continuously sequencing behavioral, device, network, and transactional signals. A legitimate user who’s tired or distracted might type a little slower or make a few typos, but their underlying patterns—how they hold their phone, the rhythm of their keystrokes, their mouse movements—remain fundamentally familiar. A criminal, on the other hand, might exhibit unnatural hesitation, unusual navigation, or copy-paste information in a way that’s completely alien to the real user’s profile. Our models are trained on this vast dataset to spot those subtle, yet critical, deviations that scream “imposter.”
The partnership with ANZ successfully targets sophisticated social engineering scams. How does your technology detect when a legitimate customer might be acting under duress, and what does the intervention process look like from detection to alerting the bank?
Social engineering is a particularly cruel type of fraud because the bank is dealing with the genuine customer, but one who is being manipulated. Our partnership with ANZ is a powerful example of how we tackle this. The technology isn’t just looking for a foreign device; it’s looking for foreign behavior. A customer under duress might show extreme hesitation, move their mouse in frantic or unfamiliar patterns, or spend an unusual amount of time on a payment screen as a scammer coaches them through the process. Our system flags these unusual patterns in real time, generating a risk score. This allows the bank to intervene at the perfect moment, perhaps by pausing the transaction and initiating a direct contact with the customer, disrupting the scam before the money is ever lost. It strengthens their ability to detect these threats without adding unnecessary friction for the vast majority of legitimate transactions.
BioCatch achieved “centaur” status in late 2023 and has shown remarkable revenue growth since. What were the key strategic decisions that enabled this rapid scaling, and what operational challenges did you have to overcome to support that growth while maintaining a 10x ROI for customers?
Reaching centaur status by surpassing $100 million in annual recurring revenue was a monumental milestone, and to follow that by exceeding the $160 million ARR mark in the second quarter of 2025 speaks to the core value we deliver. The key has been an unwavering focus on proving our worth. We deliver a return on investment of 10x or greater for many of our customers. When a bank sees that kind of result, they don’t just stay with you; they scale with you. The challenge with rapid growth is maintaining that elite level of support and innovation. We had to ensure our infrastructure and, more importantly, our expert teams could scale just as quickly. This meant investing heavily in our people and platform to handle the immense volume of data and provide the hands-on support our clients expect.
Your team includes experts in fraud, data science, and even neuroscience. Can you provide an anecdote where this multi-disciplinary expertise was crucial for innovating a solution to a new or emerging fraud threat that was stumping your financial institution partners?
That collaborative spirit is everything. I have a memory that, for me, perfectly captures the culture that makes our innovation possible. A few years ago, a critical business function was facing a severe resource crunch right as we were trying to secure a major strategic deal. The opportunity was genuinely at risk. I was able to step in, well outside my core role, and lend my support. It wasn’t about titles or departments; it was about everyone pulling together to solve the problem. That effort was recognized, and we ultimately won the deal, bringing a marquee logo into our portfolio. That’s a microcosm of how we operate. When a new threat emerges, our neuroscientists, data scientists, and fraud experts don’t work in silos. They swarm the problem together, bringing their unique perspectives, just like we did to win that deal. It remains one of my proudest moments here.
You differentiate from competitors through the sheer scale of data processed—over 16 billion sessions and 3,000 signals. How do you leverage this massive dataset to create a network effect, where a new threat identified for one client in one country helps protect all your other clients globally?
The scale is our greatest strength. No one else has deployed behavioral intelligence with this level of success. When we see a new fraud technique emerge—say, a novel social engineering tactic targeting a bank in one region—our models learn from it instantly. Because our platform is unified, that intelligence is immediately shared across our entire network. The behavioral markers of that new attack are added to the global model. This means that a bank on the other side of the world is protected from a threat it has never even seen before. Our 287 financial institution clients aren’t just customers; they are part of a global, real-time immune system for fighting fraud. The more data we process, the smarter and faster the entire network becomes.
What is your forecast for the future of digital fraud and financial crime?
I believe the future of this fight will hinge on our ability to stay focused on the human element. Fraudsters will always innovate, using new technologies like AI to create more convincing scams. But at the end of the day, their goal is to manipulate human intent. Our mission, to make banking safer every day, is our North Star. It means we have a duty to continue innovating, not just with technology, but with a deep understanding of human behavior. The future isn’t about building higher walls; it’s about creating a digital world that is so intelligent and so attuned to genuine human interaction that criminals simply cannot hide. It’s a powerful purpose, and it’s one that will guide us as we protect our clients and their customers from whatever threats come next.
