Veriff and Nala partner to make biometric onboarding for financial services more inclusive

Veriff has announced a new partnership with Y Combinator-backed Tanzanian startup Nala Money to integrate Veriff’s biometric authentication technologies will be integrated within the NALA app.

The new partnership with Veriff will now enhance the security and KYC (know your customer) capabilities of the Nala app with ID document checks and selfie biometrics.

“We can verify over 9,000 government-issued IDs from more than 190 countries, including over 50 countries from Africa,” said Veriff Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Janer Gorohhov, commenting on the news.

“This internal know-how gives us greater visibility and control to tackle identity verification issues at a variety of levels. We also use a diversified dataset to train our models, and our face comparison accuracy is the same for any ethnicity or document origin,” Gorohhov added.

Nala’s goal is to overcome the barriers preventing the African community from safely accessing traditional financial services.

“Over 70 percent of remittances sent to Africa are still sent in cash, but over 85 percent of financial institutions now have a digital presence,” explained Nala CEO Benjamin Fernandes. “We want to tackle the pain points which limit access to digital finance tools for the African community in the UK. This is especially important as society shifts to operating ‘digital first’ with more online transactions taking place than ever before.”

“It’s exciting and reassuring to see the proactive steps Veriff is taking to build a more inclusive verification process,” Fernandes added. “It was one of the things that really stood out for us when choosing a KYC partner.”

Veriff has been quite active in the first months of 2021. Last month, the company launched a self-serve instant biometric ID verification solution and hired Amish Mody as its new chief financial officer. In the same month, Veriff partnered with fintech firm Kueski to expand the reach of its biometric verification offering to Latin America.

Article Topics

Africa  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  facial recognition  |  identity document  |  identity verification  |  KYC  |  secure transactions  |  Tanzania