FinSphere

About FinSphere

FinSphere, founded in 2007 by wireless industry veteran Michael Buhrmann, operates in the mobile security and identity authentication market. Buhrmann, an entrepreneur with over 28 years of experience in the wireless sector and co-founder of several companies at the intersection of wireless and other industries, envisioned using a mobile phone as a proxy for a person's identity. This vision formed the core of FinSphere's business. The company is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington.

The firm specializes in mobile identity-authentication services, primarily for financial institutions and retail payment networks. Its core product, PinPoint, is a service that matches the geographic location of a user's mobile phone with the location of their financial transactions, such as ATM withdrawals or retail purchases. If a discrepancy is detected—for instance, a transaction occurs in a different city from the phone's location—an alert is triggered to prevent potential fraud. This service is designed to run non-intrusively in the background of a consumer's mobile device after they opt-in, without requiring further user interaction. The business model is centered on providing this technology to banking customers to help them reduce credit card fraud.

A significant milestone for FinSphere was its partnership with Visa to power Visa's Mobile Location Confirmation (MLC) service. This collaboration utilizes FinSphere's geo-location technology to help predict whether a transaction is being made by the legitimate cardholder. This helps reduce the number of legitimate transactions that are incorrectly declined due to suspected fraud. Over its history, the company has secured substantial venture capital, raising over $30 million from investors including Shasta Ventures, Mohr Davidow, Frazier Technology Ventures, and Vodafone. The company holds multiple patents in the field of mobile identity and location-based authentication.