East African Fintech Company NALA and Veriff join forces to make app onboarding ‘more inclusive’

With machine learning technology, assisted image capture and near-field communication with a human backstop, Veriff’s identity verification platform is secure, accurate and equal

Y combinator backed Tanzanian startup NALA Money (NALA) announced its partnership with a leading global identity verification (IDV) provider Veriff. Veriff will be supporting NALA in offering secure access to financial services via reliable and inclusive identity verification.
 
Building on the success of their personal finance app, which is used by over 250,000 users across Tanzania, NALA’s new service is tailored to the needs of the African diaspora. To fulfil their mission of creating economic opportunity, NALA plans to address the hidden barriers that prevent the African community from accessing traditional financial services safely and seamlessly. Their decision to partner with Veriff is a step toward providing equal access to all.
 
As NALA’s CEO Benjamin Fernandes explains: “Over 70% of remittances sent to Africa are still sent in cash, but over 85% of financial institutions now have a digital presence. 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. It was one of the things that really stood out for us when choosing a KYC partner.”
 
Veriff’s co-founder and Chief Product Officer Janer Gorohhov explains: “We can verify over 9,000 government issued IDs from more than 190 countries, including over 50 countries  from Africa. This internal knowhow 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.”
 
Veriff is focused on finding solutions for various inputs and content that users upload to the identity verification platform. The company  has  developed adaptive decision making thresholds to assess lower quality images on ID documents fairly, mitigating the bias caused by differing   document specimen qualities. Also, if the automated decision is inconclusive, Veriff has a team of specially trained manual fallback specialists with over 30 nationalities represented. This allows for specialization, domain expertise, accuracy and speed in the facial recognition  process when algorithms are inconclusive.
 
Last month NALA announced it had become an Electronic Money Directive (EMD) agent through a partnership with Modulr, which provides an array of financial services, including but not limited to international payments. They will be rolling out their beta offering gradually from February 2021 for UK-based customers sending money to Kenya and Uganda. People can sign up for early access. 

Contact for editors:
Karita Sall, Veriff
Head of Global Marketing and Communications
karita.sall@veriff.com

Veriff is a global online identity verification company that enables organizations to build trust with their customers through intelligent, accurate and automated online IDV.  The largest database on the market, Veriff’s intelligent decision engine can analyse thousands of technological and behavioural variables in seconds, matching people to more than 9,000 government-issued IDs from over 190 countries. Founded in 2015, Veriff serves a global portfolio of organizations across fintech, crypto and mobility sectors.