How I Spent MLK Day — Online Airline Tickets in Africa
Monday night in Nigeria my Operations team and I had just finished a great discussion with some employees of Nigeria’s leading payments companies.
People said their goodbyes and headed home. But my lead mobile engineer, Zaki, was nervous.
We were supposed to fly to New York and his ticket hadn’t been confirmed. The problem was he wasn’t able to complete the payment.
He’d spent most of Sunday trying to purchase it online from his family’s home in Niamey, but the combination of US credit card, passport from Niger, and West African IP address meant Ethiopian airways and its various online resellers wouldn’t complete any of his attempted transactions. He tried again when he got to Lagos. Still no luck.
Not a problem, I thought. I’ll call AmEx Platinum travel concierge.
After 30 minutes on the phone sharing all of my and Zaki’s personal details we were able to complete the transaction.
Or so we thought….
An hour later I got an email and voicemail from AmEx. I had run into the same issue.
“Hi, this is Bobby, I … need to re-speak to you to get you connected over to our…department, so they can just, make sure that the charge that I am charging to your American Express card for Mr. Zaki, is legitimate, if you can give me a call back at 1–800… etc.”
I called back the number, gave my PIN a second time, and waited on hold for the risk team.
After an 8 minute hold I spoke with another person, confirmed all of my details all over again (name, date of birth, card number, purchase amount, etc), and only then was Zaki’s ticket finally issued.
When I asked why they had asked me to go through this process twice (both sessions were recorded), the answer was:
“Oh… because of the region.”
What region, I asked, knowing the answer.
“Well, Lagos mostly. We have to do this for… OFAC, is what they call it, and I don’t know even what that stands for.”
OFAC stands for the Office of Foreign Assets Control.
Most of Zaki’s Sunday and much of my Monday night was spent trying and failing to make an $896 purchase “because Lagos” and “OFAC.”
This can’t be the way of the future. As more Africans come online, travel and transact across borders there must easier ways to sufficiently prove your identity from any smart phone — including quickly completing a 2-factor or biometric authentication tied to a previously verified KYC — even from places like Niamey or Lagos.
This is just one of the problems we are working hard to solve at Smile Identity.
I’m glad we were able to resolve the issue (Zaki was especially relieved) but I’m disappointed we live in a world that still judge peoples’ trustworthiness by the origin of their IP address and uses 100 year old technology (talking to a human over the phone) to mitigate risk.
To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King; it is the content of our character, and the actions we take in the world, that should determine how we are judged and what we have access to.
