Smile Identity Acquires Appruve to Expand Identity Verification Across Africa

Smile Identity has acquired Appruve to expand its digital identity verification solution across Africa.

In addition to buying Appruve’s parent company, Inclusive Innovations, Smile Identity is working to finalize the transaction for its affiliated entities in Africa, Smile Identity said in a Wednesday (April 26) press release.

“With this acquisition, we can strengthen our overall understanding of the direction of KYC [know your customer] in Africa,” Smile Identity CEO Mark Straub said in the release. “This includes our knowledge of the markets, our relationships with regulators, and our collaborations with compliance officers across the continent in both the public and private sectors.”

The combination of Smile Identity and Appruve will provide customers with a digital identity solution via an expanded suite of application programming interfaces (APIs) that includes mobile money, data and anti-fraud checks, according to the press release.

In addition, the acquisition will enable Smile Identity to expand into Francophone Africa, and the combination will cover 1 billion Africans, the African diaspora and 100 million African businesses.

“From a product standpoint, we’re excited to work with Smile Identity on fraud-related data sources, an area that Appruve has looked at extensively and built some infrastructure around,” Appruve CEO and Founder Paul Damalie said in the release. “On the other hand, Smile Identity just rolled out an AML [anti-money laundering] product, and when combined with these datasets and our shared presence across multiple markets, we will provide the best possible experience for all of our clients across Africa.”

High rates of fraud and cyberthreats and a lack of advanced verification solutions to effectively fight fraudsters have been major challenges limiting the opportunities for business growth and development in Africa, Identitypass CEO Lanre Ogungbe told PYMNTS in an interview posted in May 2022.

“For someone in the region who uses PayPal there are a couple of things they cannot do,” Ogungbe said at the time. “But if you change your IP address and move it to the U.S., you can do it because now PayPal can verify you and is sure that you’re actually who you say you are.”