How Paga was able to reduce their onboarding time from 24 hours to less than 20 minutes using Smile Identity’s Enhanced KYC + SmartSelfie™.
Fintech startups in Nigeria are exposing new opportunities for financing through disrupting the traditional banking sector. With only 45% of Nigerian adults having access to a bank account, the country is underserved. There is a gap in the market, fintechs hold a lot of promise in closing that gap. Paga is one of the fintechs working to close that gap.
Paga is a payments and financial services company working to make it simple for one billion people to access and use money. They serve 3 segments of the market — consumers, agents, and businesses — providing services such as mobile money, bill payments, bank transfers, and bulk disbursements among others.
“Our goal at Paga is to fix the banking infrastructure problem in sub-saharan Africa with a large segment of the population remaining unbanked or using cash as a means of transacting. In simple terms, we want to build a better society by making it easy for people to access and use money.” — Tayo Oviosu Founder & CEO
Challenge:
With their significant growth, everyday they onboard thousands of new users onto their platform. This can be through an agent or self onboarding. This brought in a new challenge for them where they needed to use a lot of staff power to onboard each of these. This proved to be a time consuming task which put a strain on the onboarding staff. They eventually came to us with the question, how can they authenticate and onboard these users quickly, securely and seamlessly?
Solution:
After reviewing their processes and platform goals, we recommended our Enhanced KYC+SmartSelfie™ product. This product allows a user to take a SmartSelfie™, which is then matched to a photo on file in an authority database or the uploaded ID card, yielding user information. This allowed Paga to confirm that the user-submitted ID information actually belonged to the person attempting to sign up.
“Smile Identity’s Enhanced KYC + SmartSelfie™ product allows us to verify the true identity of our users quickly and with extreme confidence, without having to choose between high growth and fraud mitigation.
Our partnership with Smile Identity has given us the compliance tools and flexibility we need to move fast and onboard users swiftly.” -Tayo Oviosu Founder & CEO
End results:
Smile Identity’s Enhanced KYC + SmartSelfie™ technology has enabled Paga to improve their onboarding process, reducing the time taken from 24 hours to less than 20 minutes. This allows the team more time to concentrate on other key tasks that will allow them to reach their goal of 1 billion users. They currently have 19 million unique users in Nigeria with an additional presence in Ethiopia.
