The world has entered into a digital age where there is no return. The vast availability of the required resources for optimum business performance makes now an easier time to start a business. Consequently, small and medium enterprises are experiencing explosive growth, as the number of SMEs in Nigeria grew to 41.5 million as of 2017. These sectors of the economy are engaged in continuous expansion, which creates a genuine need to verify users and merchants/contractors to protect against bad actors and ensure trust and safety for both themselves and their customers. For SMEs to continue to thrive, they need access to the same tools, technologies, and capabilities as their large enterprise counterparts.
In most businesses, traditional identity verifications are necessary to onboard new users or customers. The emergence of the COVID19 pandemic has made standard identity verification difficult due to the restrictions placed on face-to-face communication. As a result, there has been an acceleration of digitalization needs in business incorporation to permit continuity of business creation and avoid in-person contact. In several economies, the health crisis speeded the provision of electronic services for commercial activities. Therefore, implementing new ways of carrying out ID checks like introducing digital IDs has become crucial in any digital business. The introduction of verification of digital IDs in business start-ups is not only limited to meeting the needs imposed by the current health crisis. Still, it is also key to fighting identity fraud, increasing transparency, and promoting secure online interactions in an increasingly digitalized economy.
Verification is essential to serving SMEs, but quickly and effectively verifying the legitimacy of small merchants, contractors and customers remain a key challenge. Understanding new business models SMEs present does not negate compliance obligations or risks related to fraud. However, it requires a different approach to identity verification, as various individuals need to be verified. To adapt and recover rapidly in the post-pandemic environment, business creation processes should embrace technological advancements in ID verifications.
A comprehensive approach to identity verification makes it easier to verify business owners, customers, and merchants by combining Know your Business (KYB) and Know Your Customer (KYC) processes. But even this approach requires a technology stack that easily applies the right tool for different scenarios at the right time. The unavailability of a tech stack to integrate verification products/ APIs remains a significant challenge to most African SMEs today. Identitypass’s passion for making security and compliance easy for every legit business spotted this challenge and is currently developing a verification tool strictly designed to enable SMEs to perform identity verification and onboarding processes without needing APIs and wondering about the essence of this tool? Stay put as we unveil some benefits of this SME verification tool to your business performance.
- Swift Onboarding through identity verification: Verifying customers’ identities has become more necessary than in the past. Processing these checks and engaging in onboarding manually can ultimately lead to generating inaccurate data. Our SME verification tool targets all these issues. Our AI-powered techniques spot data inaccuracies about customers/clients making onboarding possible with just a few required clicks.
- Compliance with Industry Regulations: Recently, identity theft and cybercrime have spiked. The safety of transacting online is now being compromised, leading to more strict regulations for every industry. Small businesses are having difficulties complying with these regulations as most do not possess the stamina to keep up with the ever-changing policies and industry regulations. Identitypass SME verification tool’s features will ease the compliance stress experienced by SMEs by helping them understand patterns around an individual’s data and easily spot fraudulent acts.
- Optimum security and convenience: Identity verification’s primary role is correctly identifying a user. While most small businesses tend to achieve this by conducting customer due diligence procedures., it is essential to note that the customer’s convenience should always be a priority during onboarding processes. Our SME verification tool will help your business overcome the weaknesses and frictions of the manual verification method by providing real-time data processing, adding extra layers of security to customers’ data, and generally keeping fraudsters from hacking into your system.
Want to start securing your business? We have created a waiting list for you to be the first to test our SME verification tool here. Fill out the form, and we will reach out to you.
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