We recently launched Mono Prove, our identity verification product that helps African businesses verify and onboard users more securely. As a company, we’re not entirely new to the intricacies of verifying users’ identities online — sometime in 2023, we built Mono Lookup to enable businesses to validate user-submitted information against identity databases.
Since then, we’ve learned firsthand that verifying users’ identities and staying compliant is hard for most businesses. Meanwhile, bad actors are working even harder to exploit every gap.
For African businesses, these challenges are particularly severe. In the first half of 2024, identity fraud jumped to 748%, and fraudsters stole about N400 million through accounts opened with stolen identities.
When businesses lack robust KYC verification tools, they don’t just lose money; they also lose trust. This is exactly what Mono Prove changes.
Why did we build Mono Prove?
Before we started the build phase for Mono Prove, we spoke to several businesses about their identity verification and customer onboarding processes.
We found that their existing verification tools were slow, took too long to verify a single user’s identity and impacted users’ overall experience with their product. In other cases, the tools were too clunky to use; customers would go through too many complicated steps or find it hard to share their identity documents, and then drop off during onboarding when they got frustrated with the process.
For many of these businesses, too, a major recurring pain point was getting existing verification products to integrate smoothly with their systems. The integration process was too long and unnecessarily complex. They usually had to build the verification flow from scratch, as most services offered unbundled KYC tiers that had to be set up and customised to match their verification flows and regulatory requirements.
This meant that these businesses were spending scarce developer time on figuring out the integration process, and legitimate users were dropping off due to unintuitive verification experiences.
With this feedback in mind, we built Mono Prove to solve this.
Faster, more secure verification
With our smart verification system, we verify customers’ identities in 40 seconds — matching user-submitted information against government-issued IDs and trusted databases, then confirm that the customer is real with liveness checks and facial recognition. This helps businesses onboard real users to their service instantly and stay compliant.
Reusable identity verification
We noticed the verification experience for returning users was still unnecessarily complex. Every time a user signs up for a new app or service, they start the entire verification process from scratch. Same identity documents, same selfies, same liveness checks. This is tedious for users and inefficient for businesses.
We built something different into Mono Prove: a tokenised KYC feature that lets users securely store their verified identity details on Prove after their first verification.
Whenever they sign up for a different service that uses Mono Prove, they can safely grant access to their identity details in one click — no document re-uploads or additional liveness checks. Their encrypted identity data is shared with the business, and they’re onboarded instantly.
For returning users, this means that they can verify their identity once and maintain full control over who can access their information. On the other hand, businesses can onboard real, pre-verified customers, driving higher signup conversions.
Pre-built KYC verification tiers
Beyond user experience, we also saw that long integration timelines were a common problem for businesses. Most verification tools offer unbundled services — one API for document verification, another for liveness checks. So businesses had to build their verification stack from the ground up, configuring complex systems to create compliant KYC flows. This delayed their go-live time and took up significant developer resources.
With Mono Prove, businesses go from spending months on implementation to getting their verification process operational within days. This is because Prove offers ready-to-use verification flows split into three KYC tiers — Basic, Intermediate, and Enhanced — that align with different risk levels and regulatory requirements. Each tier includes:
| Verification Type | Tier 1: Basic | Tier 2: Intermediate | Tier 3: Enhanced |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core Identity Verification | |||
| Full name | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Date of birth | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Phone number | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| BVN | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| NIN | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Biometric Verification | |||
| Facial Recognition & Liveness | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Document Verification | |||
| Government-issued ID (International Passport, Voter’s Card, Driver’s License) | — | One document | Multiple documents |
| Address Verification (Utility Bill) | — | — | ✓ |
With a single API, businesses can implement the tier that matches their compliance needs and start verifying users immediately using Mono Prove.
Building the identity verification infrastructure for Africa
Speaking to businesses that already use Mono helped us understand how to build meaningful features into Mono Prove that actually solve their verification needs. From our private beta to full launch, our partners have said that Mono Prove has helped them:
Speed up their onboarding process by 40%
Verify customers securely
Convert signups into real users instantly
Stay compliant while spotting fraudulent patterns quickly
Reduce integration to go-live time
However, our work with Prove is only just beginning. As identity fraud gets more sophisticated, the verification process needs to be smarter and more seamless. We want to change how identity verification works in Africa’s digital economy, and build an ecosystem where:
Verified identity is reusable: Users verify once with Prove and use it across multiple services without having to repeat the process.
Trust becomes a network effect: Identity verification becomes safer and smarter for everyone as more businesses and users join the Mono Prove network.
Users control their data: Customers can securely store their identity details and grant or revoke access at any time.
We've spent some years understanding Africa's identity verification challenges, first with Mono Lookup, now with Mono Prove, and we're committed to solving this problem with the right identity infrastructure.
If you want to build faster and more compliant verification flows for your users, sign up to use Mono Prove here and check out our technical documentation.
