Relx Group has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the entire issued share capital of ThreatMetrix for a consideration of £580 million (US$817 million) payable in cash.

ThreatMetrix is an authentication company headquartered in San Jose and founded in 2005. ThreatMetrix's technology analyzes connections among devices, locations, anonymized identity information and threat intelligence, and combines this data with behavioral analytics to identify high-risk digital behaviors and transactions in real time.

Relx Group said ThreatMetrix has strong client relationships across financial services, e-commerce, and media sectors and offers authentication solutions for account origination, payments, card-not-present transactions and account logins.

ThreatMetrix's Digital Identity Network analyzes over 100 million transactions per day across 35,000 websites from 5,000 customers. This makes it the one of the largest repositories of online digital identities in the world, encompassing 1.4 billion unique online identities from 4.5 billion devices in 185 countries, according to a press release.

ThreatMetrix will become part of Risk & Business Analytics, which, under the LexisNexis Risk Solutions brand, addresses fraud and authentication challenges by applying advanced analytics to physical identity attributes, including identity credentials, addresses and asset ownership.