Xconomy: Mitek Systems Building New Business in Verifying Online Identities

A few years before the presidential election of 2016, with all its Wikileaks, Russian disinformation campaigns, and phony Facebook links, San Diego's Mitek Systems (NASDAQ: MITK made a strategic decision to expand into identity verification technology. Funny how things work out. While mobile banking technology still represents 60 percent of Mitek's business, COO Kalle Marsal said Thursday the company's identity verification technology is now its fastest-growing business. After paying $10.6 million in 2015 for IDchecker, a Dutch provider of identity and document authentication technology, and $15 million last October for iCar, a Barcelona-based specialist in digital identity verification software, Mitek recently closed its biggest-ever acquisition--a nearly $51 million deal for A2iA, a French company focused on artificial intelligence and imaging technology. Mitek is a onetime defense contractor that re-invented itself as a technology provider for the banking industry--initially with computer vision technology for handwriting recognition (i.e.