March 2021 Changelog: Onboard businesses across Africa (GH 🇬🇭, NG 🇳🇬, KE. 🇰🇪, SA 🇿🇦, UG 🇺🇬)

Written by Laud Bruce-Tagoe

We started off the month of March with a few improvements and fixes. Keeping Appruve running smoothly is a priority for us — we appreciate your feedback, bug reports, and questions. Here’s what changed in March 2021:

1) Verify the legitimacy of African Businesses:

You can use the Business Lookup endpoint to validate a business and the Ultimate Beneficial Ownership endpoint to lookup the directors of a business.

Watch the introductory video below:

• Business Lookup: Today, you can use the business lookup endpoint to validate the legitimacy of a business. Just provide a business identifier, for example, Tax Identification Number (TIN) or an RC number and then you will get full registered details of a business, including a confirmed business identifier, address and business status. This is currently available for Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda
• Ultimate Beneficial Ownership: The second endpoint allows looking up beneficial ownership information for a business using the entity name or the registration number. The information returned includes general company and share allocation information, individual shareholder information, company address, and the type of company. This is currently live for Nigeria with Kenya and Ghana to be released next month.

Appruve Business is available both as a dashboard service or via the APIs.

2) Extract information on a business document and verify with Appruve Business

• Appruve Agency’s OCR API + Appruve Business API: We realised that, when you ask a business customer to upload their documents, there’s a laborious task of going through each document to match the details to a business before verifying on Appruve Business. With this endpoint you can upload a Business Registration Document, Appruve Agency performs an OCR on the document to extract the relevant registration details, then makes a check against the relevant business registry to ensure a record of the business exists. This is currently only available for Nigeria and for CAC registration documents. We have businesses like Flutterwave ,Brass Banking ,Pezesha and Raise using this.

It’s a wrap! Look out for new features we will be rolling out under Appruve Agency and Appruve Business.

Send your feedback, questions and bug reports to hello@appruve.co