Namibia weighs biometrics options for foundation of instant payment system

One of the signs of progress towards realizing the “prioritizing use, accelerating impact” part of the ID4Africa 2025 AGM’s official theme was the presence of more representatives from relying parties.

Among them was Marsorry Ickua, the chief operating officer of Instant Payments Namibia.

The instant payment system initiative launched last year as part of Namibia’s drive to reap the economic gains of digital public infrastructure. Namibia has a new Civil Registration and Identification law, a budget to implement it, and new digital ID cards are rolling out next month.

Ickua was seconded from Namibia’s Central Bank to work on the country’s new instant payment system shortly before he spoke to Biometric Update on the sidelines of ID4Africa 2025 in Addis Ababa. He says the country also has a strong financial system for the digital payments rails to be built on top of, but has so far struggled to deliver the benefits of the system to people in rural areas.

The  project is currently at the stage of “deploying infrastructure and getting stakeholders on board,” Ickua says. As part of that process, he was both attending presentations and discussions and familiarizing himself with some of the biometric authentication technologies being exhibited.

“One of the underlying pillars of a successful instant payment product for a country is good authentication and understanding who people are,” Ickua notes. The system will likely use biometrics for user authentication, Ickua says, because of concerns about the ease with which cards can be forged or cloned.

While fraud prevention is a major concern, the project is largely intended to support financial inclusion, and hopefully lower the cost of transactions.

Whatever technology is chosen has to be cost effective to implement both for Instant Payments Namibia but also the merchants and organizations it wants to use the system. This has proven a challenge so far.

“We were in the process of looking at very expensive hardware,” Ickua says, “putting them down at places like commercial banks, which is where we need to do KYC, as well as at points of entry.”

Lessons from abroad

Namibia has ambitions of establishing a comprehensive system, with the instant payments capability potentially integrated with other systems to facilitate public and private service delivery, but Ickau emphasizes the need to ensure strong foundations are in place.

He cites the example of the India Stack, and how it leverages a high connectivity rate and coverage of digital ID.

“Only then, once those two pillars are well covered, was their financial sector with the UPI platform very successful,” Ickua says. “It started off slowly but then it kind of just blew up. That’s what we’re aiming to do. We have similar challenges, even though our populations are vastly different.”

The overall objective of Instant Payments Namibia is similar to Kenya-founded M-Pesa, in that it gets money moving in remotest corners of country. But there are also some key differences, according to Ickua.

“M-Pesa’s success is drawn from the fact that it was born out of necessity,” he explains.” I think at the time maybe the financial sector wasn’t addressing people’s needs. ‘I just want to be able to get something from the store,’ and maybe you can use your credit to do that. In our case, we have a fairly established payment system already. We’ve got card payments, we’ve got EFT et cetera, and it’s working fairly well. Our only challenge is that it’s not going to as many corners of the country as we would like it to.”

Namibia’s financial system currently covers about 78 percent of the country’s population, Ickua says. “That last 20 percent is very difficult.”

The country will need to improve mobile phone network coverage, electricity and public understanding of tech and fintech, he says, “let alone getting devices, smart or otherwise, into people’s hands”

Encouraging options

What Ickua saw and heard at ID4frica this year was encouraging, he says: “There are some cost-effective solutions that are available for us.”

He notes technologies like QR codes as a possibility, and says, “At least we have options.” At the same time, he says, “we don’t want to dictate how the ministry applies the technology.”

Ultimately, the Instant Payments scheme will likely need another entity to do the identity verification for onboarding, Ickua says. “We want to rather focus our efforts on just the overlying financial services component, enabling the payments seamlessly, rather than also being the engine that does authentication and verification against the national registration database.”

The Central Bank would be willing to consider capital outlay to fast-track the process and make it more cost-effective, but whatever is decided on, the system will need to use the national registration database for onboarding to prevent fraud and money laundering.

Third parties “do have some information, and it is quite credible, but at the end of the day it’s still a commercial entity doing this. So we want the meeting of minds. We want the MNOs’ data combined with the government’s data so that we can have a proper, legitimate authentication process on which we can then rely, with financial services on top of it.”

Namibia is interested in eventually adding digital wallet on top of the payment system, and ultimately wants digital wallets and bank accounts to be interoperable.

“For the financial sector, you may want to entertain not just the payment element of it, but being able to have that digital wallet, where you can store such a thing as” an e-passport or birth certificate to facilitate transactions, Ickua says.

He is optimistic enough about meeting the initiative’s short-term goals to look further ahead, despite the many items on the to-do list above.

“We’ve got a lot of challenges to get through, but I think we’re on the right track. And once the urban communities pick the technology up, they will want to get those resources to their communities” in the remotest parts of Namibia.

Article Topics

Africa  |  biometrics  |  digital ID  |  digital payments  |  digital public infrastructure  |  financial inclusion  |  ID4Africa  |  ID4Africa 2025  |  Instant Payments Namibia  |  Namibia