Socure acquires Qlarifi to build real-time BNPL infrastructure

By Vriti Gothi

Socure has acquired Qlarifi, a FinTech that provides the first real-time database for Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) credit activity, in a move aimed at addressing structural gaps in BNPL underwriting, consumer visibility, and cross-provider risk assessment.

The integration of Qlarifi’s dataset with Socure’s identity and risk-decisioning systems establishes what the companies describe as the first unified infrastructure combining identity verification, fraud intelligence, and BNPL-specific credit information. The acquisition builds on the model behind Socure’s First Party Fraud Consortium and positions the company to support lenders with more accurate, real-time decisioning in a rapidly expanding segment.

BNPL has grown into one of the fastest-scaling consumer credit products globally, accounting for nearly 6% of U.S. eCommerce spending and expected to surpass $700 billion in global transaction value by 2028. Yet BNPL repayment behaviour frequently sits outside traditional credit bureaus, limiting lenders’ ability to detect overextension or fraudulent intent and preventing consumers from building positive credit history through timely repayments.

Qlarifi—founded by former Klarna and Zip executives was created to address that gap by tracking consumer usage across providers in real time. Its data model enables providers to identify loan stacking, emerging risk signals, and repayment capacity before issuing new instalment credit.

“We built Qlarifi to solve a very real pain point: the lack of infrastructure to protect consumers from overextending themselves across multiple BNPL providers,” said Alex Naughton, Co-founder and CEO of Qlarifi. He added that joining Socure provides “commercial scale, balance sheet, and world-class analytics” to advance industry-wide risk oversight.

By merging that capability with Socure’s identity graph and RiskOS decisioning engine, the combined platform is designed to validate identity consistency across providers, improve detection of first-party fraud, enable thin-file borrowers to qualify for BNPL responsibly, and reduce fraud-driven payment costs for merchants.

The acquisition extends Socure’s broader strategy of becoming a full-stack decisioning platform across consumer verification, fraud prevention, AML compliance, and underwriting. The company now serves more than 3,000 clients, including major banks, large technology platforms, and public-sector agencies.