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ImaliPay reduces their onboarding time to under 10 seconds using Smile ID

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ImaliPay at a glance

Goal

Onboard users quickly across 3 countries.

Industry

Financial services

Countries of operation

Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa

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Outcomes

10s
average onboarding time
40K +
users digitally verified

About Imali Pay

In Africa, gig work is becoming more vital in advancing the continent's socio-economic goals. Sub-saharan Africa has the world's youngest population, with over 70% of its population being under 30 years of age. This is the population of fresh job seekers, and they are all unable to get official employment. Freelancing is attracting a large portion of this demographic to self-employment.

Despite the promise held by the gig economy for the youth, it comes with several hurdles. Access to capital, savings, loans, and medical insurance are huge hurdles for them.

ImaliPay is a company that is addressing this issue. At the onset, ImaliPay co-founders noticed that drivers in ride-hailing would frequently run out of fuel, and some gig workers lacked phone credit to make calls or have faulty phones that were costly to replace. ImaliPay was birthed to serve this need and serves the gig economy by providing a one-stop shop for financial services tied to a Buy Now Pay Later marketplace, insurance, savings and investment. The goal is to financially empower millions of gig economy workers across Africa, ImaliPay currently operates in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.

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Challenges with manual verification

As ImaliPay was scaling its operations in three countries, a manual process was not scaleable or efficient. Not only was manual checking slow, but it also left room for human error when checking IDs. They would often find users with multiple accounts, mistakes like this left ImaliPay uncertain if their identity verification checks were reliable.

ImaliPay required a solution that reduced fraud cases, reduced the creation of multiple accounts from a single user and sped up the onboarding process. In a bid to automate the onboarding and identity verification process, ImaliPay sought out Smile Identity to deliver on these goals across its operational markets in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa.

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Partnering with Smile ID

We helped ImaliPay implement our Biometric KYC solution. This was a fitting product for them as it allowed them to search users by an ID number on a government database and match a selfie to the official government photo on file. Using reliable sources like government databases to verify user details and facial matching to ensure they were onboarding the correct person, ImaliPay now has much more confidence in the accuracy of their user verification.

With this new verification process, ImaliPay was able to reduce their onboarding per customer to just under 10 seconds and stop users from creating multiple accounts.

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“Smile ID has enabled ImaliPay to reduce fraud incidents by verifying the identity of its users in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa using the various identity documents in the three countries. We now have the confidence of knowing who is transacting on our platform and the verification happens in less than 10 seconds.”

Reward WambayiCTO
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