Digital identity verification and Know-Your-Customer (KYC) technology company, Verifyme Nigeria, has launched a new service aimed at facilitating faster and more precise address verification.
Enabled by 4D GIS technology, the service will improve last-mile agent efficiency by pre-screening addresses based on cell tower and GPS positioning in real time.
According to Brandon Wang, chief information officer, Verifyme, non-standardization of addresses is a massive problem for businesses in Nigeria. When consolidated across industry, particularly finance and ecommerce, this can translate to billions of naira in delayed or lost income as well as thousands of unfulfilled deliveries.
He said: “When we entered the market, we believed lastmile capacity to be the missing piece of the digital ID problem. However, our experience over the last three years has shown that to solve last-mile authentication, we need to first resolve ambiguous addresses.
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“To emphasise this, about two months ago, one of our banking clients requested for 1,500 address verifications to be fulfilled in a week. However, we had to reject 1,000 of those requests due to vague or incomplete addresses supplied by loan applicants. This issue significantly slowed down the onboarding process and translated to a loss of potential revenue for our client and staff- hours for us. Not to mention that over a thousand people were not able to get access to credit in that week.
“This is a key reason we are launching a 4D GIS backed address verification service into the Nigerian market to help our agents use the improved accuracy to carry out verifications on incomplete or vague addresses in real time. The new service will also be available to integrate into existing workflows for our customers, so a company like Jumia will be able to integrate with our webhook to pinpoint the exact location of non-standard addresses,” he added.
Verifyme offers digital identification and verification-as-a-service for the financial sector and other industries. Over the last 3 years, the company has built Nigeria’s largest ID authentication network and developed the capacity to carry out thousands of address verifications per week through its tech-enabled network of verification agents across the country.
In addition to using celltower and GPS positioning, the address verification service will be more user-inclusive by emphasizing personal contributions to the verification process.
