LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Promon target UAE mobile fraud surge

LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Norwegian mobile security firm Promon have announced a strategic partnership aimed at closing a widening gap in mobile fraud defences, with the UAE positioned as a primary reference market. The alliance combines LexisNexis's ThreatMetrix digital identity and behavioural intelligence platform with Promon's Shield in-app protection and Insight telemetry layer, creating what the companies describe as an integrated view of fraud risk at both the application and identity levels.

The timing is calibrated to a measurable shift in attacker behaviour. In the UAE, 88% of all financial transactions now flow through mobile channels, according to figures cited in the release. In 2025, 66% of the country's cybercrime incidents targeted mobile environments, up four percentage points year on year. The attackers' method has evolved accordingly: rather than targeting users directly, they are compromising the application environment itself through malware injection, screen overlay attacks, device tampering, and reverse engineering, techniques designed to subvert fraud controls before a risk decision is even attempted.

From identity verification to environment trust

The partnership reflects a structural shift in how fraud prevention is being framed across financial services. Verifying who a user is has become necessary but no longer sufficient; organisations now need to assess whether the environment in which that user is operating has itself been compromised. Promon Shield addresses the application layer, hardening apps against runtime manipulation and collecting tamper-resistant telemetry. ThreatMetrix then ingests those signals alongside its broader identity and behavioural dataset, feeding LexisNexis's Dynamic Decision Platform to support real-time risk decisions across the mobile customer journey.

"As fraud increasingly targets the mobile app and device environment, organisations need clearer insight into whether each session can be trusted," said Daniel Kollberg, chief executive of Promon. "We are bringing Shield, mobile risk detection, behavioural insights, and tamper-resistant telemetry into one of the world's leading fraud intelligence platforms."

The combined offering is positioned across financial services, payments, insurance, healthcare, and digital banking, sectors where mobile trust is, in the companies' framing, mission critical. LexisNexis Risk Solutions, part of RELX and headquartered in Georgia, already serves clients in more than 190 countries. Oslo-based Promon brings established in-app protection deployments across Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

Convergence read-across: cybersecurity meets fintech infrastructure

For cross-sector strategists, the partnership sits at an intersection that is attracting serious capital attention. Mobile fraud prevention is no longer a point solution layered onto banking apps; it is becoming foundational infrastructure for any organisation conducting high-value digital interactions, from insurance claims to healthcare record access to government identity services. The shift has broad implications for the cybersecurity vendor landscape, where pure-play identity providers are under growing pressure to extend their coverage down the application stack, and for financial institutions that have built risk architectures around network-level signals that app-layer attacks increasingly bypass.

The UAE context adds a geopolitical dimension worth noting. The Gulf's rapid move to mobile-first financial infrastructure, accelerated by Vision 2030-era digital economy strategies across the GCC, has created a high-value target environment that threat actors are actively exploiting. Regulators in the region have been sharpening expectations around digital fraud liability, which raises the commercial stakes for banks and fintechs deploying mobile-first customer journeys without corresponding app-layer assurance. Partnerships of this kind, which bundle telemetry, identity intelligence, and runtime protection into a single orchestration layer, are increasingly the product architecture that compliance and risk teams across the Gulf are being asked to procure rather than build internally.

The broader vendor market is watching. As mobile channels absorb an ever-larger share of financial and healthcare interactions globally, the competitive pressure on fraud intelligence platforms to demonstrate end-to-end coverage, from device integrity through to transaction decision, will only intensify.