Artificial Intelligence has been described as a key component that will help accelerate Africa’s drive towards achieving open finance and bridging the continent’s $120bn lending gap.
Esigie Aguele, co-founder/CEO of VerifyMe Nigeria, a digital identity and eKYC company based in Lagos, Nigeria, made the projection while speaking on TV business news programme, Power Lunch West Africa on CNBC.
Aguele, who called for increased focus and investments within the space, said: “The opportunities that can be harnessed from AI in Africa are enormous. One of the exciting things about where Africa is positioning is that we are at the cusp of an emerging economy in terms of powering open finance and open banking.
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“With the advent of AI and all it has to offer, especially in the area of predictive analytics products, this will have a trigger effect on the financial market by enabling historically financially excluded people to get secure loans and other financial services due to the availability of consumer analytics,” he said.
According to him, “Looking at the financial sector alone, Africa is looking at the potential of the technology to bridge a market of about $120bn in lending.
“If you look at use cases outside the financial sector, you will see that AI is fast becoming a critical enabler that is delivering innovation, scale and efficiency across board.
“In the eKYC space within which we operate, AI’s ability to read identity cards, power facial recognition and Optical Character Recognition, OCR, not only helps achieve compliance but also supports remote services. There are several other uses cases across other sectors.”
VerifyMe is recognised as an African company leveraging practical technology to solve Africa’s challenges.
The company was voted as a Notable Ecosystem Champion in Nigeria by the StartupBlink Global Startup Ecosystem Index Report.
VerifyMe is also a technical partner to the Nigerian government on the National Identification Number (NIN) project as well as to the Edo State Government in the country’s south-south region on the citizen ID scheme.
Recently, the company launched its B2B infrastructure, QoreID, which connects mid- to large scale corporates with digital identity verifications and critical consumer data to help them onboard customers seamlessly and support credit lending.
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