Operators within the digital identity space have been challenged to optimize their service delivery to integrate compliance and customer profiling protocols in one unified infrastructure.
This comes on the heels of regulatory challenges many African fintechs face, particularly as they expand their operations across the continent.
Speaking at the 5th edition of the Inside Identity webinar series, formerly Digital Identity Matters, Esigie Aguele, Co-founder/Chief Executive Officer, VerifyMe Nigeria, noted that African Fintechs and the broader finance ecosystem are in a unique situation.
Esigie, whose company recently launched QoreID, a dedicated digital identity and consumer analytics platform, stated that FinTech’s are currently at an intersection where they crave a one-stop digital identity infrastructure that can help them scale and meet compliance requirements swiftly and seamlessly.
He added that this will create the possibility of simultaneously unlocking new opportunities and accelerating the continent’s drive towards open finance.
According to Aguele: “We are fast approaching an era when there will really be no separation between the different types of Know Your Customer (KYC) checks ranging from basic consumer profiling to Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulatory demands. The industry is evolving beyond just identities for KYC, especially as it pivots beyond the Application Programming Interface (APIs). We see a trend where the demand for identity verification and KYC services will expand beyond merely telling Fintechs who their customers are to providing further insights on what they are.
Illustrating the company’s recently launched B2B platform, QoreID, Aguele said: “QoreID is a robust infrastructure built to deliver both on compliance demands and also provide valuable insights in one platform for businesses. Customers using the platform can carry out identity verification, Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and criminal background checks as well as financial profiling and consumer analytics simultaneously. And the beauty of it is that it is seamless and cost-effective.”
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On the criticality of compliance in entrenching open finance in Africa, he said: “At this stage of our evolution as a continent, compliance is a very important factor without which Africa may never be able to crack open finance. We look at it from a four-stack perspective using a technical, operational and regulation lens, with identity at the core. Even if we decide to look at comparable countries, you must go through identity, then payments, and it is the attributes of the data mined from the payments- volume, veracity, value, variety and velocity – that get you into the third layer which is data as a service, where worthiness information on customers is created, before you get to the fourth layer which is the use of the data to evaluate customers in order to unlock opportunities in credit, lending, mortgages, etc.
“Compliance is the glue that holds all of this together because the reality is that the internal analytics and due diligence that any company undertakes on its own cannot be compared to what a company like VerifyMe can do for them. For instance, we have access to government-sourced data points as well as relevant identity data.
Presently, VerifyMe services a significant number of fintech across the country and that has enabled us to build reliable consumer profiles, which in turn can be translated to valuable analytics that can be used across the industry.”
With over two million identity verifications carried out so far in 2022 alone, VerifyMe is a leading digital identity and customer analytics technology company powering open finance in Africa.
In Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, the company currently services over 60 percent of legacy banks, 90 percent of the top 10 digital banks, over 50 top credit lenders, and half of the top 15 insurance companies. The recently launched QoreID, links businesses to trusted identities and to look be the functional data associated with the identities., to, l.
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