Appruve, an API infrastructure used by financial services globally to verify identities, gain insights on the financial health of customers and detect fraudulent identities, has gone live in Egypt as it continues to expand across the continent.
Egypt is the latest African country in the Appruve network, and in extension their entry into the MENA region. Now with operations in five countries – Egypt, Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana, Appruve is one of the most extensive data verification platforms in Africa.
With Appruve’s APIs in Egypt, users can check for the existence of submitted national ID in the national database; transliterate Arabic to English (and OCR text capture); perform a facial comparison and match as part of its document authenticity analysis; and perform ‘liveness’ checks for the existence of a real person.
“The goal is to enable pan-African integration and facilitate trade. To make this possible, trust is a key element for the African Continental Free Trade Area initiative to take off.
“Digital channels for commerce and finance will rely on Appruve, and so will large pan-African and sub-regional financial institutions like Ecobank, Equity Bank, UBA, Zenith, GT Bank and Bank of Africa,” said Paul Damalie, CEO of Appruve (Inclusive Innovations Inc.).
Appruve is used by financial institutions such as Sterling Bank in Nigeria, Ecobank Group and IC Securities – one of the largest asset managers across West Africa, and numerous fintechs across Africa.
Appruve is an alumnus of the DFS Lab 2018, StartupBootCamp Afritech 2018, Google ML Accelerator 2018, 2019 cohort of the Facebook Accelerator and the HILL Justice Accelerator 2019
Egypt – a country with an estimated population of 102,796,445 people and having almost 120 years of banking history, is still underbanked as a nation – with only 14 percent of the adult population either owning or sharing an account at a traditional financial institution, according to World Bank data.
Furthermore, the gap between women and men who own bank accounts is 12 percent, while the gap between high net worth individuals and low net worth individuals is 21 percent. Thus, increasing financial inclusion should be a paramount objective for the country’s financial institutions, which if accomplished could unlock huge potential for the banking sector to grow.
