Fraud does not respect the boundaries between onboarding, login, account changes and transactions. Yet, inside many financial institutions, those moments are still monitored by different teams using different systems, each working with only part of the picture.

That disconnect has become one of the greatest vulnerabilities in financial services.

At The Trust Playbook, a closed-door executive breakfast hosted by Sumsub at Innovation City, leaders from banking, fintech, payments and digital assets examined what it now takes to protect customers and institutions without making legitimate users pay the price through slower, more frustrating experiences.

The central argument was clear: trust can no longer be treated as a compliance checkpoint at the beginning of the customer journey. It must operate as a connected, continuous system.

Fraud Has Moved Beyond Onboarding

The traditional response to digital fraud has focused heavily on identity verification at sign-up. Establish that someone is who they claim to be, and the institution can proceed with reasonable confidence.

But according to data presented by Sumsub, there can be 2.5 times more fraud after onboarding than during it.

The risk now sits across the customer lifecycle: at login, when account information is changed and when transactions take place. An identity may have been legitimate when the account was opened but later compromised. A real customer’s credentials may be taken over. One device may be connected to dozens of identities, while one face can appear across multiple accounts.

In some cases, a single fraudster may operate as many as 98 different identities.

This changes the question fraud teams need to ask. It is no longer simply: “What is wrong with this person or this account?” It is: “What else is happening across this network?”

Fraud rings only become visible when signals are correlated. A device, face, payment method or behavioural pattern that appears unremarkable in one isolated interaction may become highly suspicious when seen across multiple identities, accounts or institutions.

Sumsub’s position is that financial institutions need to detect that network before the damage is done.

Africa’s Fraud Challenge is Escalating

The need for connected intelligence is particularly urgent across Africa, where digital financial services are expanding rapidly alongside increasingly sophisticated, AI-driven fraud.

Figures shared during the discussion indicated that 47% of African consumers and 53% of African businesses experienced fraud at least once during 2025. South Africa recorded a 31% overall fraud rate, alongside a 269% increase in deepfake incidents.

The scale and multinational nature of the threat was illustrated by INTERPOL’s Operation Serengeti 2.0, which brought together investigators from 18 African countries and the United Kingdom. The operation resulted in more than 1,200 arrests, disrupted over 11,000 malicious infrastructures and recovered almost US$100 million.

In Zambia alone, investigators dismantled an online investment fraud operation that had targeted approximately 65,000 victims and generated estimated losses of US$300 million. According to Sumsub research, Zambia showed the highest percentage of approved applicants involved in fraud networks (37%) globally.

These are no longer isolated individuals attempting to fool a document check. They are organised, technologically capable networks using artificial intelligence, fake identities, social engineering and digital platforms across borders.

“You only need one person with a couple of apps on his phone to commit fraud at enormous scale,” said Hannes Bezuidenhout, Sumsub’s VP of Sales Africa during the discussion.

The Hidden Cost of Fragmented Compliance

Many institutions still rely on five to nine separate systems for identity verification, fraud prevention, anti-money laundering checks, business verification and transaction monitoring.

The direct licence fees are only one part of the cost.

Every additional platform creates another integration, another operational workflow and another source of data that must be reconciled. Engineering teams spend months connecting systems that were not designed to communicate with one another. Compliance teams move between platforms. Decisions are duplicated, delayed or made with incomplete information.

For a financial business entering a new market, building compliant operations across this fragmented stack can take up to six months. Multiply that across several African jurisdictions, each with different identity documents, databases, regulations and customer behaviours, and the model quickly becomes difficult to scale.

One market and one disconnected vendor at a time is not a continental growth strategy.

Sumsub advocates for a single, configurable platform spanning know-your-customer verification, business verification, fraud prevention, transaction monitoring and compliance. Its AI-powered trust infrastructure allows institutions to construct different journeys for different customers, markets and risk profiles, customizing the rules to the local regulatory requirements.

The technology matters, but so does control of the logic. Financial institutions need to understand who determines the rules, how they change and whether teams can adapt them without repeatedly rebuilding operations.

Rejection is a Revenue Problem

An effective trust system must stop fraud, but it must also recognise legitimate customers.

This is where blunt controls become expensive. Customers can be rejected because they have an older identity document, their face is underrepresented in the system’s training data, their phone camera is poor or they are less digitally fluent than the verification journey assumes.

Every false rejection represents a potential customer - and potential revenue - lost.

Sumsub challenged leaders in the room to interrogate their real pass rates. An average pass rate of 60%, for example, means four out of every ten prospective customers are failing to complete verification. Some will represent genuine risk, but others may simply have been defeated by the process.

New verification methods are beginning to reduce that friction. Sumsub’s document-free verification can confirm eligible users directly through trusted government and other authoritative databases, removing the need to photograph or scan a physical identity document. Its service currently provides regulatory-compliant Non-Doc Verification in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.

The commercial impact can be significant.

South African investment platform Brokstock increased its verification pass rate from 82.3% in 2024 to 92% in 2025, while reducing median verification time from 31 seconds to nine seconds. The platform had registered more than 100,000 investment accounts by 2025.

For Nigerian cross-border payments platform Raenest, Sumsub brought customer verification, document-free checks and business verification into one integration, reducing verification time to approximately 2.5 seconds, while delivering a 55% improvement in pass rates.

These results demonstrate that stronger fraud prevention and better customer experience do not have to work against one another. When identity, compliance and risk systems are designed together, financial services providers have real chances of gaining the most demanded competitive advantage – trust.

To learn more about effective business growth strategies with Sumsub, visit https://sumsub.com/trust-infrastructure/