34% of reported digital financial crimes in Africa, are attributed to identity theft resulting in $4 billion in losses for businesses in 2023, INTERPOL . Nigeria saw N52.26 billion lost to fraud in 2024, four times what was lost four years earlier.

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PINs, Passwords, and OTPs, being the existing authentication methods, sent over SMS or email by payment systems, are no longer as safe. OTPs' (one-time codes) can be intercepted easily through SIM swaps, stolen phones, or spam calls.

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As a result, regulators all over the continent are responding. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) now requires every bank account tied to a BVN and a NIN. Ghana updates its requirements for SIM registration to include links to biometric data to tackle mobile money fraud. Kenya Introduces “Maisha Namba” as a unified digital identity layer across public and commercial services. For businesses operating in the region, understanding the compliance landscape across African markets has become a priority. 

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Why PINs and OTPs aren’t secure enough for African payment systems

In African markets, a single smartphone could serve multiple users in a household or small business. 

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They share PINs with family and staff they trust. Phones are passed on, and then lost; SIMs are swapped; and criminals can move a victim’s number to a new SIM to intercept OTPs. Also, this sort of information can be bought cheaply, and AI can be used to make deepfakes, which can get past ‘liveness’ checks. 

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Every year, South Africa loses $300 million due to SIM swap fraud, according to the 2025 COMRiC Telecommunications Sector Report. 

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The shift towards biometric authentication across Africa’s major payment markets appears to be the solution, as it has proven effective against identity fraud. It verifies the individual directly, as opposed to information that the authenticator should have or know. However, understanding how it works and where it still falls short remains a concern for businesses.

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How does Biometric authentication work in African payment systems?

Biometric authentication identifies a person based on physical or behavioral traits that are unique to the person. There are varying levels of adoption across Africa, but 3 modalities are at the forefront.

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Fingerprint Verification 

Nigeria’s Bank Verification Number system, BVN, which covers 67.8 million registered individuals, is built on data from fingerprint and facial biometrics. The BVN biometric profile is linked across the entire Nigerian banking system. 

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Modern Android devices store fingerprints in a secure enclave on the device, allowing authentication to happen locally. The payment processor doesn’t have access to the biometric data, which reduces its exposure to a data breach. 

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However, its limitation is coverage, as many older low-end devices, which represent a substantial share of the African market, lack fingerprint sensors.

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Facial Recognition

This is the fastest-growing biometric data. Liveness detection has become a standard practice for E-KYC across fintech platforms in Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya . The customer is required to take a selfie or short video, and the system then compares the live video against a photo stored in the government ID database. This confirms the authenticity of the document and the individual presenting as its owner.

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Adoption is growing but inconsistent due to the required computing power for Real-time facial matching, which experiences visible delays on lower-bandwidth connections, a common problem in many African markets.

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Voice Authentication

Although more susceptible to replay attacks than facial recognition or fingerprints, Voice authentication has proven viable in markets where USSD and feature phones still dominate, such as in the rural areas of East and West Africa. 

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A major security loophole: liveness detection

Fraudulent attacks are now more sophisticated than ever, and biometrics alone can’t stop payment fraud.

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Presentation attacks: fraudsters now hand in photographs, a silicone fingerprint, or a recorded voice sample to beat biometric recognition. Without ‘liveness’ detection, these remain as serious threats to biometric payment systems, making them no different from a basic static password. 

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Liveness detection requires more evidence that the biometric data provided is from a living person in real time, detecting tiny movements, depths, and reflections a simple photograph can’t replicate for facial recognition.

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After over 110 million verification checks in 2024, the Smile ID 2025 Digital Identity Fraud in Africa Report states that biometric fraud reached an all-time high of 16% in just three months. Smile ID is one of several KYC verification providers operating across African markets, each tackling these challenges in different ways.

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Payment processors without liveness detection are an illusion of security waiting to be found out by someone who just holds up a picture and gets through. The differences in biometric databases across African markets make security even more vulnerable as fraudsters carefully exploit the varying verification systems by targeting processors with weak biometric requirements.

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Why is biometric security difficult to implement across Africa

Businesses accepting payments and onboarding customers across multiple African markets all face the same challenge regarding security and identification, as countries in Africa have different identity infrastructure. Each country maintains its own regulatory timelines, databases, and document types, and these businesses must navigate all of them.

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Every market runs on a different identity system

In Nigeria, the credentials for identification are the BVN and NIN, with the Central Bank requiring all banks and wallets to carry at least one, or they risk automatic restrictions. 

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Kenya, on the other hand, verifies customers using national ID numbers, International passports, phone numbers, and Kenya Revenue Authority tax PINs. The Maisha Namba programme gives every person in the country a unique personal number at birth, which is linked to biometric data, including fingerprints, facial, and iris recognition.

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South Africa uses its 2025 upgraded biometric verification system after experiencing failure rates of up to 50% as reported by its Department of Home Affairs. The new update adds fingerprints and facial recognition to the National Population Register, which now achieves error rates lower than 1%. This is the system used to verify customer identities by banks and the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) 

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Ghana uses voter’s cards, international passports, and driver’s licences for identity verification. The government’s newly introduced biometric SIM registration requirement links every SIM card to the National Identification Authority’s biometric database. 

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For a business operating across these four markets, the challenge is the different identity verification systems, making the engineering team create separate identification pipelines for every country in which it operates. 

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Fraud is evolving faster than current basic defences

In July 2025, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) found a case of identity fraud in Nigeria where thousands of people were selling biometric data, including BVNs and NINs, to fintech companies. Similarly, in South Africa, fraudsters are deploying AI-modified deepfake impersonation documents. 

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Biometric authentication only works if the systems that power it can detect advanced forgeries and verify against the government database in real time across different countries. 

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What businesses need from an identity and authentication layer

Any business growing into African markets needs the provider’s Identity Verification layer to do the following: 

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Multi-database Connections. real-time connections to the different government identity databases across every market the business operates in. 

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Real-time Verification to speed up the onboarding process, as delays in batch identity verifications lose customers on the sign-up screen 

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Anti-deepfake capabilities against AI-generated attacks. A verification layer without liveness detection is a liability. 

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Building identity verification country by country, with separate vendor relationships, separate APIs, and separate compliance workflows for each market, is one of the highest hidden costs of African business expansion. Kora’s guide on how to build and launch a fintech product in Africa covers why this infrastructure decision matters from day one.

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How we process identity verifications across the different African markets

Our Identity service offers a single integration point by connecting your business to national identity databases in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa through one API. 

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Our verification processes meet local legal requirements without adding new biometric data capture obligations to your stack.

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Each verification type connects to the relevant government database. Your onboarding process sends a request, we check it against the authoritative source, and you get a response in seconds.

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What this means for B2B payment operations

Biometric security impacts B2B payment processes in three key areas. 

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Vendor and supplier authentication: Companies doing large numbers of payments to suppliers in different African countries are now more than ever requested to verify the identity of recipients using account validation tied to biometrics before a payment is cleared. Payment processors that can’t do this will encounter disputes over payments and more reversals of payments.

Cross-border transaction friction: International payments which are manually checked because the recipient doesn’t have biometric details attached to their account, cause delays, and these delays get worse as the number of payments goes up. If 5% of a 300-payment batch needs checking, that’s 15 payments held up; at a large scale, that’s a real operational problem. The Cross-Border Payments and Ecommerce Report has full details of these problems in African markets.

Fraud liability exposure. Who takes responsibility for fraud is changing in several African countries. In the past, responsibility fell mostly on customers (for example, if someone stole your card details or hacked your account). Now, businesses that can’t prove they did enough to verify identities at the point of payment are held responsible when fraud disputes escalate.

Our local network connections send payments through systems in each country, which already have biometric and identity verification checks built in. A payment to a Nigerian account linked to a BVN, a Ghanaian mobile money account linked to a Ghana Card, or a Kenyan bank account which has been KYC-verified, goes through networks which already meet local verification  rules, and tech teams don’t need to do any extra work. For businesses creating or adding digital wallet operations, these networks handle the identity layer automatically.

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How the single integration works.

A company verifying customers across all four supported countries uses one API, manages the checks through one dashboard, and gets the results through one webhook system.

Compare that to the alternative: get a local identity company in Nigeria, a different one in Kenya, another in Ghana, and another in South Africa. Each would have its own API design, its own data format, its own help service, and its own billing arrangement. The cost of that division grows with every country you add.

Your team only needs to integrate once. The test system is the same as the live system, so you can verify identity requests before using real customer information. And when we add new types of identity documents or new countries, your integration is already done.

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Enterprise-grade security infrastructure

Our systems have PCI DSS Level 1 certification – the highest level of payment card security. We also have ISO 27001 for information security management, and ISO 22301 for business continuity. Access controls include multi-factor authentication and IP whitelisting.

For a business dealing with identity information in several African countries, these certifications are important for your own risk management and for the regulators in each market.

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Flexible verification workflows and dedicated support

Not every business needs the same verification process. A fintech company taking on retail customers in Nigeria has different identity requirements than an e-commerce company verifying sellers across West Africa, or a delivery company verifying driver identities in Kenya.

Our API requests allow flexible verification processes. You choose which types of identity documents to verify, set your own risk levels, and create the sign-up process which fits your product. Verification fees are taken directly from your Kora balance, with no separate billing system or invoicing for each country.

Checking identity across multiple African countries involves rules that documents alone can’t explain. Our All The Support You Need™ approach means dedicated technical and non-technical help during and after integration. When a rule change in Nigeria affects how you handle BVN verification, or when South Africa’s changing rules need an update to your sign-up process, our team works with yours to get it right.

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Where African payment security is heading

Biometric verification is becoming essential in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa. The rules are all going in one direction: payments which can’t show biometric-linked identity authentication will have more problems, and more responsibility for fraud.

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Central bank digital currencies, which the CBN and South African Reserve Bank (SARB) are now actively looking towards, will probably need biometric verification as a key part of access. 

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African regional economic groups are also pushing for identity systems that can work together across countries. If national identity databases start to connect across borders in the same way that payment networks already do, the cost of checking identity across borders will reduce substantially. 

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Companies that have already built their checking systems on one API, which works in many countries, will be the first to benefit. Our Future of Embedded Finance in Africa report looks at how these system changes are reshaping financial services across the continent.

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For companies growing across multiple African markets, the question isn’t whether to deal with biometric verification rules. The question is whether your payment system handles those rules automatically, or whether your team is rebuilding that compliance system country by country.

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Processing payments across African markets? Talk to our team about how our infrastructure handles local identity and authentication requirements. Or dive into our API documentation to see how verification works in practice.

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For a deeper look at compliance requirements across African fintech markets, download the Compliance and Regulation 101 report.

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