Over 95% of Indians and Indonesians hold digital IDs linked to government databases, making document-free onboarding a promising reality for businesses

Sumsub, an all-in-one verification platform, published its guide, Streamlining identity verification in emerging markets. This new resource will help businesses in the fintech, crypto, gambling and trading industries onboard more users from developing countries, specifically Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia and Nigeria.

Here are the top 5 highlights from the guide:

• According to the Sumsub Identity Fraud Study 2022, Nigeria has some of the highest rates of ID forgery in the world. In 2022, Nigeria accounted for 5.4% of fraud detected worldwide, underscoring the challenges for companies onboarding Nigerian users.  However, 90 million Nigerians have already registered for a National Identity Number (NIN), which allows companies to verify people without dealing with potentially forged documents;

• The biggest KYC challenges in Argentina are poor quality cameras and photos, which lead to verification failure;

• Online identity fraud is seriously impacting markets in Brazil, including crescent online retail, telecom, finance and banking. More than half of the documents forged in Brazil do not contain MRZs (machine-readable zones), which makes them especially easy to fabricate;

• About 96% of India’s 1.4 billion population are already registered in the country’s biometric ID system, Aadhar; and

• More than 95% of the population of Indonesia has e-KTP cards linked to a government database of citizen identities and biometrics. The country also has the largest and fastest-growing digital economy in Southeast Asia, expected to reach $130 billion by 2025, primarily led by the e-commerce industry.

These countries are embracing key digitalization trends. This is particularly the case for identity verification, where large-scale digital ID initiatives have been replacing paper documents. This means that local users are getting accustomed to database verification, rather than physically scanning and uploading their IDs. Therefore, government databases may well replace document-based verification in the near future, allowing businesses to drastically simplify user onboarding in these regions.

In the guide, Sumsub’s experts cover how document-free verification can streamline user onboarding in developing countries, enabling companies to onboard 2B+ people without asking them to upload their IDs. This method—which Sumsub calls 1click verification—uses government databases to speed up onboarding from 50 seconds to just 4.5 seconds on average, helping improve pass rates by 35% on average. All this can be done without compromising data quality, security and user experience.

“Businesses in the fintech, crypto, gambling and trading sectors can use our guide to learn more about document-free verification, as well as the specifics of national documents, local user habits, fraud trends and AML regulations in developing countries, and more. All this will help navigate the verification landscape in Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia and Nigeria, with the right insights to seize market opportunity and deal with local KYC and AML challenges,” said Andrew Sever, co-founder and CEO of Sumsub.