As we get closer to the Africa Tech Summit happening in Nairobi, I cannot help but think about the role innovation and technology is playing in the transformation of Africa and her people.
Where the rest of the world saw unbanked populations, Africans saw an opportunity to build solutions that are making payments & money transfer seamless, affordable and more intuitive. Where the rest of the world sees challenges, Africans see solutions and are embracing innovation and technology to turn around their fortunes. Africa is rising and innovation and technology are playing a pivotal role. I am proud to play a part in this growth.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw
It is estimated that about 500 million Africans still struggle to prove their identities. This is a fundamental problem that has and will continue to limit their access to products and services that can transform their lives. At Smile Identity, we are solving this problem and playing our part in the African renaissance.
We are doing this in two ways. First, we partner with ID authorities: Public sector institutions and rule-making bodies that establish regulations on how legal identities are issued, maintained and used in a jurisdiction. These agencies act as a source of truth. Through our partnerships with these ID authorities, companies can confirm the legal identity of an individual (after getting their consent) against a public sector database using a name, a face, an ID number, a phone number or some combination of these elements. Once verified, these consumers can access high value products and/or services. Previously, validating such identities was manual and would take hours or even days involving back office paperwork and human review of documents. With Smile Identity, such validations now take a matter of seconds enabling companies to scale rapidly.
Smile is integrated with over a dozen ID authorities across the continent — the largest data footprint in Africa.
Second, by rolling out our proprietary and innovative biometric face verification product — SmartSelfie™, Smile Identity can verify the identity of an individual using facial biometrics even for users without a formal ID. Having trained our machine learning on over 5M images, and de-biasing our algorithms for African faces, Smile Identity can verify an individual against a pre-registered photo with 99.8% accuracy across any mobile device type or smartphone, making it uniquely suited for adoption on the continent.
In 2021, we completed over 12 million identity verifications in across Africa.
By making it easy for Africans to verify their identities online, Smile is helping expand access to the ongoing technological revolution. By allowing companies to verify the identities of individuals looking to use their services, Smile is building trust by ensuring that people signing up for services are in fact who they say they are, reducing the risk and fear of fraud that may limit or cripple their businesses.
A lot of the success we have seen at Smile Identity is as a result of collaboration and partnerships we have entered with various stakeholders across the continent. As we head into the Africa Tech Summit, I look forward to seeing more players in the African ecosystem come together, forge lasting partnerships and solve some of the biggest challenges we face in Africa.
Africa is rising.
