Mastercard and Smile ID Collaborate to Accelerate Merchant Onboarding in Africa

Collaboration to streamline and digitise the merchant onboarding process, enabling acquiring partners to automatically onboard merchants in over 50 African countries in three minutes or less.

Cape Town, South Africa | 4th September 2024: Mastercard has teamed up with Smile ID, a leading African digital Know Your Customer (KYC) provider, to streamline the merchant onboarding process for businesses in South Africa, Nigeria and across Africa. This collaboration will see Mastercard provide Smile ID with its Merchant Digital Onboarding Program (MDOP), which offers third-party providers a secure and automated experience for acquiring partners, such as banks, mobile network operators, and payment facilitators, to ensure appropriate verifications when onboarding merchants.

The integration of Smile ID’s technology into the MDOP enables acquiring partners to digitally onboard merchants quickly and efficiently, streamlining verification and enhancing the customer experience. This process allows acquiring partners to digitally onboard merchants in over 50 African countries in three minutes or less.

“Traditional onboarding methods are often plagued with inefficiencies, high costs, and vulnerabilities to fraud. Our collaboration with Smile ID marks a significant advancement in the merchant onboarding process, setting a new standard for speed, security, and user experience. This move demonstrates our commitment to fostering a secure, inclusive, and efficient digital ecosystem for African businesses. Together, we are leading a transformative journey that drives inclusive growth and financial empowerment across the continent,” said Sekai Ndemanga, Senior Vice President, Head of Emerging Markets, Global Acceptance Team at Mastercard. 

KYC due diligence and account opening are major bottlenecks in the merchant onboarding process due to manual data entry and lack of system connectivity, with banks reporting that these two processes consume over 40% of onboarding time, according to McKinsey. 

A Mastercard report corroborates this, stating that it takes 3-7 days for a traditional acquirer to onboard a merchant on average. Consequently, banks are streamlining these processes by automating public data aggregation, leveraging existing customer data, and eliminating duplicate data elements. Payment facilitators, using automation and new Point of Interaction solutions, now offer onboarding in just 5-15 minutes, significantly faster than traditional methods.

Through this collaboration, acquiring partners can now leverage Smile ID’s suite of solutions, including ID document verification, SmartSelfie™ biometric face authentication, government database checks, AML/PEP checks, business verification, bank account verification, fraud prevention, phone number verification, and e-signature capabilities. 

“Smile ID is thrilled to collaborate with Mastercard because of their commitment to financial inclusion and innovation. Our combined offering allows acquiring banks and payment facilitators to delight their customers with locally optimised signup experiences while maintaining global best practices for speed and security,” added Mark Straub, CEO of Smile ID.

This collaboration enables financial institutions to process merchant applications faster and with greater security. Merchants will also benefit from a streamlined, efficient, and secure onboarding process, while fintech and telcos can utilise the solutions to expand their service offerings and improve customer experiences, in line with Mastercard’s commitment to growing payment acceptance in key emerging markets. 

This joint effort is a pivotal step towards supporting African businesses with faster access to efficient payment systems, fostering financial inclusion and economic growth across the continent, and aligning with Mastercard’s global mission to bring one billion people and 50 million micro and small businesses into the digital economy by 2025

About Mastercard

Mastercard (NYSE: MA), www.mastercard.com, Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible. Using secure data and networks, collaborations and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses realise their greatest potential. 

Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.

About SmileID

Smile ID, www.usesmileid.com is Africa's leading digital KYC provider and was founded to solve the specific challenges faced by companies trying to onboard users in unique African conditions. We have built proprietary machine learning algorithms and a technology platform to cater to all skin tones, entry-level devices, and users operating in low bandwidth environments. 

We pride ourselves on striking the right balance between stopping fraudulent transactions and reducing onboarding friction and have enabled some of the fastest-growing businesses across Africa to onboard at scale and in real-time, evidenced by performing over 150 million KYC checks to date. Our client base includes Zenith Bank, Stanbic IBTC, Flutterwave, Fairmoney, Binance, Uber, Bolt, Kuda Bank, Opay, Paystack, Luno, Yellowcard, iKhokha and hundreds more. We are backed by Costanoa Ventures, Future Africa, PTB Ventures, Khosla Impact, 500 Startups, CRE Venture Capital, and more. 

Visit - https://go.mastercardservices.com/digital-merchant-onboarding