Paga reduces their onboarding time by 98% using Smile ID
Paga at a glance
Goal
Seamless remote onboarding
Industry
Financial Services
Country
Nigeria
Outcomes
- 740K +
- Remote Verification Completed
- Under 20 minutes
- Onboarding Time
About Paga
Fintech startups in Nigeria are exposing new opportunities for financing by disrupting the traditional banking sector. With only 45% of Nigerian adults having access to a bank account, the country is underserved. There is a gap in the market and fintech holds a lot of promise in closing that gap. Paga is one of the fintechs working to close that gap.
Paga is a payment and financial services company working to make it simple for one billion people to access and use money. They serve 3 segments of the market — consumers, agents, and businesses — providing services such as mobile money, bill payments, bank transfers, and bulk disbursements among others.
Challenges with scaling
With their significant growth, every day they onboard thousands of new users onto their platform. This was conducted through both agents or self-onboarding. While the use of agents opened accessibility, it brought in a new challenge for them where they needed to use a lot of staff power to onboard users. This proved to be a time-consuming task which put a strain on the staff.
They eventually came to us with the question; “How can we authenticate and onboard users faster while still being confident that an individual is who they say they are?”
Partnering with Smile ID
After reviewing their processes and platform goals, we recommended our Biometric KYC solution. A biometric verification matches the face from a user-submitted selfie to a photo on file in an authority database. It also securely returns the user's information that the government has on file for that individual by looking up their ID number.
This allowed Paga to confirm that the user-submitted ID information is valid and that it actually belonged to the person attempting to sign up. Biometrics allows Paga to confidently onboard users remotely because it ensures the user behind the screen is the ID number owner.
Smile Identity’s Biometric KYC product has enabled Paga to fully automate a remote identity verification process, reducing onboarding time from 24 hours to less than 20 minutes. This allows the team more time to concentrate on other key tasks that will allow them to reach their goal of 1 billion users.
“Smile Identity’s Biometric KYC product allows us to verify the true identity of our users quickly and with extreme confidence, without having to choose between high growth and fraud mitigation. Our partnership with Smile Identity has given us the compliance tools and flexibility we need to move fast and onboard users swiftly.”