As the digital economy in Africa and the Middle East expands, reliable Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) infrastructure is becoming essential. Fintechs, mobility platforms, digital banks, and other platforms all need fast, accurate verification systems to onboard users and meet tightening regulatory standards. 

Yet across many markets, checks remain slow, fragmented, and expensive. For individuals, unreliable onboarding flows mean many users never complete sign-up. For businesses, especially Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), weak KYB systems make it difficult to prove legitimacy, access credit, or open accounts. Corporate registries are inconsistent or outdated, slowing verification and adding compliance friction.

These gaps restrict how quickly digital products scale, limit financial access for millions, and raise costs for the companies trying to serve them.

Morocco-based regtech startup, Vove ID, believes the region is entering a new identity infrastructure moment. Founded in 2024 by Aoussar Khalid, Tarik Ait M’Barek, and Youssef Saber, the company is building a verification stack tailored to Africa and the Middle East. 

Vove claims it can verify users in under 60 seconds, integrate into production in less than five hours, and recognise over 2,100 identity documents from more than 100 countries. Instead of rigid contracts, it uses pay-as-you-grow pricing starting at $49 per month.

“We’ve personally dealt with fragmented KYC providers and inconsistent verification for African and MENA users while building other products,” the company said. “We built Vove because we experienced the same problems our customers face today.” 

The startup has already attracted funding from The Baobab Network and Open Startup International Corp, fuelling its first commercial deployments and early expansions.

Africa’s digital identity crunch

Across the region, demand for reliable verification has grown faster than the systems built to support it. In many Sub-Saharan markets, nearly 500 million people lack legal identities. Even where documents exist, verification is slowed by fragmented databases, inconsistent formats, and offline manual processes. Corporate registries in several markets are incomplete or outdated, making KYB checks slow and error-prone.

Several providers have attempted to modernise this layer. Smile ID has processed more than 200 million KYC checks since 2017. 

Yet much of the ecosystem still relies on global verification tools designed for Western documents, not the variety of ID formats, multilingual naming systems, and low-end devices common in Africa and the Middle East.

Vove said these challenges show why its competitive edge comes from focusing specifically on documents unique to both regions, adapting to local formats, languages, network conditions, and non-standard user journeys while still supporting global coverage. “We saw three big gaps,” Vove explained. “Most tools were global-first and only lightly adapted to African and MENA IDs, which led to low pass rates and manual review. Pricing and contracts weren’t friendly to early-stage players. And integrations took weeks.”

 Building for speed and scale

At the core of Vove’s system is an onboarding flow combining 3D liveness detection, optical character recognition (OCR), and real-time data extraction. Its coverage is broad: the system can recognise more than 2,000 identity documents from nearly 200 countries. Most checks finish in under a minute, and 95% of users are verified on their first attempt.

Vove said its performance gains are supported by AI-driven components, including machine learning models trained on African and MENA identity documents, AI-powered document classification, and pattern recognition systems that flag anomalies during extraction. These models are continuously retrained using regional datasets, edge cases, and client feedback.

The startup also offers lightweight web and mobile Software Development Kits (SDKs) that allow developers to integrate verification with minimal effort. The SDKs include prebuilt modules for liveness and document capture, support environments such as React Native and Flutter, and are designed to work smoothly on low-end devices. Combined with its API-first architecture, this tooling is what enables Vove’s integration window of under five hours.

“First-try pass rate means the percentage of users who complete KYC successfully on their first attempt without needing to retry or go to manual review,” Vove explained. “The figure comes from production logs across our core markets, North Africa, West Africa, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).” 

Fraud detection

Vove has designed its system to stop sophisticated attacks, from simple replays to complex presentation attempts. Its liveness layer combines active and passive signals, depth cues, and behavioral checks to detect suspicious activity; sessions that fail these checks are blocked or escalated.

AI contributes here as well. Vove uses machine learning models to detect unusual behavioural patterns, device inconsistencies, and recycled imagery. These models evolve with new fraud patterns and are updated regularly across its customer base.

Vove updates rules and thresholds based on new attack patterns and client feedback. At default settings, the system operates below 1% false acceptance and a low single-digit false rejection rate, with stricter modes available. The startup emphasises maintaining a smooth experience on low-end devices and weak networks.

KYB and risk management

Beyond individual users, Vove extends its verification system to businesses, addressing a critical gap in the region’s digital economy. Reliable business verification is becoming increasingly important. The global e-KYB market was valued at $157 million in 2024 and is projected to reach $440 million by 2033, reflecting growing recognition that strong KYB infrastructure unlocks commerce, credit access, and growth for emerging-market enterprises.

Vove aggregates data from official registries, credit providers, and public records to verify businesses. When registry information is incomplete, the system falls back on document-driven verification, extracting corporate details, checking sanctions and adverse media, and flagging cases for enhanced due diligence rather than blocking them outright.

Its hybrid approach combines third-party biometric and OCR engines with Vove’s own orchestration layer, document classifiers, templates, and risk engine. Proprietary elements optimise for African and MENA IDs, while liveness, document checks, device intelligence, and Anti-Money Laundering signals are combined into a single risk score. 

For regulated enterprises that cannot send sensitive data to the cloud, Vove offers an optional on-premise deployment alongside compliance tooling built around the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), giving teams control over verification and risk monitoring from a single dashboard.

Why SMEs matter

Many SMEs across Africa and MENA struggle to access funding due to compliance barriers. Traditional financial institutions often perceive SMEs as high-risk because of limited collateral, sparse credit histories, and difficulty meeting stringent lending criteria.

Vove positions itself as an SMS-first alternative, offering usage-based billing, lower minimums, and support via Slack or WhatsApp. A product team can get a basic verification flow live in a few hours, with pricing early-stage companies can afford.

“Proper KYC and KYB plus AML is not just a checkbox but a growth enabler,” the startup said, noting how faster verification helps SMEs access financing and scale. Clients pay primarily for completed checks, with pricing that scales with volume. Most of Vove’s customers are SMEs and fast-growing startups across African and MENA markets.

In more mature setups, Vove has reduced the number of files needing manual review by automating document extraction and basic AML checks. Businesses switching from manual KYC see onboarding times drop from hours to under a minute, with gains in first-try completion rates. 

Vove now serves clients across fintech, payments, crypto, mobility, HR, and marketplaces. Active customers include CreditChek, a Nigerian B2B platform that acts as a credit and data infrastructure for businesses, and Paylik, a Moroccan fintech platform.

Navigating challenges and scaling impact

Digital identity is becoming the backbone of Africa’s digital economy. Payments, lending, worker verification, mobility, e-commerce, and cross-border trade all depend on it. The stakes are substantial: the global identity verification market was valued at $11.97 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $39.82 billion by 2032, growing at 16.4% annually. 

Within this expansion, the Middle East and Africa digital identity solutions market alone is expected to grow from $2.74 billion in 2024 to $7.1 billion by 2030, reflecting surging demand for verification infrastructure across the region. The opportunity is massive, but so is the execution challenge. “Identity is becoming infrastructure,” Vove said. “If you get it wrong, everything built on top collapses. If you get it right, entire industries can scale.”

For Vove ID, the path forward is complex. “Technically, the challenge is staying ahead of sophisticated fraud while keeping the user experience fast on low-end devices,” the company said. “Regulatorily, we work across a patchwork of KYC and KYB rules. Operationally, we’re a young company selling into highly regulated institutions, so we have to earn trust one procurement cycle at a time.”

Vove is preparing a seed round in the low seven figures to deepen its KYB, AML, address verification, and risk orchestration layers, while expanding go-to-market teams across Africa, MENA, and parts of Europe. The raise will also support certifications, audits, and regulatory work.

Its 24-month roadmap: become the default KYC, KYB, and AML infrastructure for fintechs and digital platforms focused on the region, expand its regulatory footprint, and strengthen intelligence layers around registry connectivity and ongoing monitoring. “Startups and SMEs are becoming the engines of digital growth here,” Vove said. “If we can remove the compliance friction slowing them down, we can help unlock the next million businesses.”

Vove’s future will depend on whether it can maintain performance at scale, win regulatory confidence, and prove that a region-first verification stack can outperform global incumbents.

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