Smile Identity, Africa’s identity verification provider has today published its inaugural report on the State of KYC report H1 2022 where they delve into the different KYC processes as well as fraud trends they have noticed in Africa.
The company is using their data to understand different trends across the continent and how these affect business, as well as regulators.
“We have seen fraud attempts consistently grow over time, in the last year it has grown to 26% of all KYC checks alone. Businesses across the continent are becoming more aware of their vulnerabilities and turning to partners like us for assistance in preventing and detecting fraud on their platforms. Our technology, which was specifically designed for Africa, provides immense value to our clients, and we are constantly evolving and improving our systems to easily detect newer types of fraud at all levels of sophistication. “ Navid Scheybani, Chief Growth Officer, Smile Identity
The “Know Your Customer” (KYC) process is a requirement that helps businesses identify their users and verify their credentials. KYC allows companies to identify risks associated with individual customers before they happen. Central banks often require KYC checks to prevent financial crimes like money laundering. For fintechs, online payments companies and ecommerce, KYC can prevent fraud.
Fraud attempts increased by 30% in the first half of 2022.Half of biometric fraud cases were related to identity theft, the other half includes more sophisticated spoofing attacks.A new type of fraud that is emerging and has already reached ~10% levels is Duplication Fraud.
Countries with lower adoption of biometric IDs may notice fluctuations in fraud as less modern systems provide more avenues for attack.ID database outages have averaged at 9% of the time, disrupting the ability to verify people and businesses to scale.
Fraudsters are more frequently targeting buy now pay later platforms. BNPL and investment & savings experience more than 30% biometric fraud.
Smile Identity is present across six markets in Africa: Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Rwanda and Uganda. It covers more than 250 million identities and verification for 15 different ID types while performing over one million identity checks every month.