Mastercard and Smile ID Partner to Streamline Merchant Onboarding Across Africa

Mastercard has partnered with Smile ID, an African digital Know Your Customer (KYC) provider, to enhance and streamline the merchant onboarding process in over 50 African countries, including South Africa and Nigeria.

Mastercard will integrate Smile ID’s digital verification technology into its Merchant Digital Onboarding Program (MDOP), with the aim of allowing acquiring partners such as banks, mobile network operators, and payment facilitators to onboard merchants more efficiently by reducing the time for onboarding to three minutes or less.

Mastercard’s Merchant Digital Onboarding Program is designed to streamline the process for small and medium-sized businesses to accept digital payments. It simplifies the onboarding experience by offering tools and resources aimed at helping merchants to quickly and easily set up digital payment acceptance, reducing the barriers to entry.

Smile ID’s solutions, including ID document verification, biometric face authentication (“SmartSelfie”), and government database checks, will look to enable faster and more secure onboarding processes for interested merchants.

“Smile ID is thrilled to collaborate with Mastercard because of their commitment to financial inclusion and innovation,” said Mark Straub, CEO of Smile ID. “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.”

While traditional onboarding methods can be slowed by manual data entry and lack of system integration, creating bottlenecks, Smile ID and Mastercard seek to reduce these delays and improve the efficiency of the onboarding process for merchants and financial institutions by incorporating automation.

“Traditional onboarding methods are often plagued with inefficiencies, high costs, and vulnerabilities to fraud,” said Sekai Ndemanga, Senior Vice President and Head of Emerging Markets, Global Acceptance Team at Mastercard.  “Our collaboration with Smile ID marks a significant advancement in the merchant onboarding process, setting a new standard for speed, security, and user experience.”

Source: The Kenyan Wall Street

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September 5, 2024 – by Ali Nassar-Smith