Finance and payments are gearing up for a new future. And they’re spending big to do so. During the first half of the year, the cybersecurity industry recorded over 215 mergers and acquisitions (M&A) collectively worth over a hundred billion dollars. But the more consequential signal was buried beneath the transaction count. Artificial intelligence (AI) security, machine identity, industrial infrastructure, browser protection, behavioral fraud detection and automated remediation are increasingly appearing on buyers’ shopping lists. The enterprise attack surface is expanding to new targets: AI agents, industrial equipment, cloud applications, browsers, application programming interfaces (APIs) and automated software. At the same time, attackers are exploiting something more fundamental than technical vulnerabilities: how people and machines behave within interconnected digital systems. That shift is turning cybersecurity M&A into a useful leading indicator. See more: Wall Street’s New Cybersecurity Threat Starts With a Phone Call Fraud and Cybersecurity Are Becoming the Same Problem Cybersecurity buyers are assembling platforms capable of connecting signals that historically lived in separate tools. Identity data alone may not reveal an attack. Neither may behavioral data, network telemetry, browser activity or application logs. But correlated together, those signals can show that an authenticated employee is behaving unusually, an AI agent is accessing unexpected information or an industrial device is communicating with a system it normally does not. Visa’s planned $2.4 billion acquisition of BioCatch, announced last week (Aug. 3), makes this emerging trend difficult to ignore. BioCatch already serves more than 350 banks across 21 countries, protecting users with its AI) and machine learning-based solutions that analyze thousands of application, behavioral, device, and network signals like keystrokes and device handling to separate legitimate users from fraudsters. PYMNTS Intelligence collaborated with Visa DPS on “The Issuer Risk Playbook,” which found that 42% of bank and non-bank issuers rank fraud