SEON partners with leading African Neobanks

By Edlyn Cardoza

Africa struggles with a substantial underbanked population. According to a recent FinTech Times report, around 57% of the continent’s population don’t currently have access to a traditional bank account, which equates to nearly 95 million people. Neobanks play an important role in helping to fill this gap, providing people with access to essential financial services, such as loans and the ability to save.

However, on account of their digital nature, neobanks find themselves at greater risk of falling victim to cybercrime and online fraud. That’s why two leading African neobank businesses, Carbon and FairMoney, have partnered with leading online fraud prevention software provider, SEON. With SEON’s assistance, the two businesses are now able to improve their fraud protection performance and onboard new customers in a more frictionless manner.

Specifically, SEON’s solution is enabling Carbon, a pan-African digital bank with an active presence in Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana to identify synthetic profiles more effectively, thus helping the company to grow with less risk. Carbon can also access new data points from customer profiles and create more predictive and stable models within its risk framework.

Likewise, SEON’s digital and social lookup system with device fingerprinting is giving FairMoney better access to reliable data. This access has allowed FairMoney to make its blacklisting process more precise and enabled a streamlining of its customer onboarding process. As a result, the app-based bank, which received a $42 million Series B funding round in 2021 is now able to process loan decisions in just eight seconds.

Speaking on the decision to adopt SEON’s solutions, Cecilia Lopez, Head of Data Science at Carbon, commented: “We are very excited because we want to be tougher in tackling fraud, and SEON enables us to access data points we have never used before. Being able to eliminate a great part of the noise coming from fraud allows us to train more predictive and stable models and makes us feel much more confident about our risk framework.”

With SEON’s support, the two neobanks are helping to engender greater levels of financial inclusivity across Africa. The new strategic partnerships are allowing the FinTech companies to gain clearer insights into customer profiles through access to enriched customer data. That’s why, SEON’s flexible solution is so ideal for fast growing companies as it enables rapid development with minimal risk.

Speaking on the new partnerships, Jimmy Fong, CCO at SEON, said: “Both Carbon and FairMoney are providing much-needed services to pan-African users. Together, the companies are allowing underbanked individuals to gain access to crucial financial services at an important time. We’re so proud to be part of their journey and to help the companies reduce levels of risk within their own operations.”

Recently, IBS Intelligence reported that SEON, the fraud fighters, announced a partnership with Sorare, a French start-up company for fantasy football, to stop fraud within their referral program.