Socure has announced that it is acquiring Qlarifi, establishing the real-time BNPL credit system and setting a standard for accessible payments. With Qlarifi, Socure now combines identity verification as well as risk decisioning with BNPL-specific visibility “to help lenders say “yes” to good customers faster while meeting regulatory calls” for increased consumer protection.
Socure, the AI-focused platform for global identity, compliance and risk decisioning, confirmed in a release its strategic acquisition of Qlarifi, the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) consumer credit database.
The combination establishes the industry’s “unified identity, anti-fraud, and BNPL credit infrastructure, building on Socure’s First Party Fraud Consortium.”
This enables consumers to build credit via BNPL repayment, reduces first party fraud losses for lenders and merchants “by up to 70 percent, while providing the transparency regulators have been seeking as BNPL becomes one of the fastest growing forms of credit globally.”
Unlike traditional credit products, BNPL transactions have operated outside conventional credit reporting systems, “creating blind spots that put both consumers and lenders at risk.”
Traditional credit bureaus were not designed for “high frequency, small dollar lending decisions made in milliseconds.”
They struggle to ingest granular repayment histories and “often misassign tradelines due to outdated entity resolution and identity linking technology.”
These errors can reduce credit access for “trustworthy consumers while creating blind spots that increase lender risk.”
BNPL usage continues to “accelerate.”
In the United States, BNPL reportedly accounts for nearly “6% of all e-commerce transactions and is growing at more than 20% annually.”
Internationally, BNPL spend is projected to “exceed $700Bn by 2028.”
Despite this adoption, the infrastructure needed to support growth has lagged, “leaving lenders without cross provider visibility, consumers without a path to build credit, and merchants exposed to rising fraud driven losses.”
But now with Qlarifi, which was founded by a team of BNPL professionals from Klarna and Zip, the platform is built to “help lenders protect consumers from overextension.”
The platform gives BNPL providers the insight to expand services for customers while pinpointing high-risk behavior “such as loan stacking and first-party fraud.”
Qlarifi’s technology has demonstrated “significant impact in its first-of-its-kind pilot in Europe.”
By integrating Qlarifi’s ability to “aggregate real-time repayment data across multiple BNPL providers with Socure’s Identity.”
Graph intelligence and RiskOS decisioning engine, lenders gain a single decisioning fabric capable of:
- Validating that the applicant is the same real person across multiple BNPL providers
- Identifying cross-provider loan stacking and overextension
- Significantly reducing first party fraud losses
- Enabling thin file consumers to access responsible credit
- Lowering fraud driven payment costs for merchants
The acquisition serves as a next-step for Socure, the world’s decisioning platform, which now provides “solutions via RiskOS for consumer verification, business verification, age assurance, credit underwriting, fraud prevention, anti-money laundering compliance and ongoing authentication.”
Socure is the platform for digital identity verification, compliance and fraud prevention solutions, used “by the enterprises and government agencies to build trust and mitigate risk.”
Leveraging AI and machine learning, Socure’s platform achieves “the highest accuracy, automation, and capture rates available in the industry.”
Serving customers in various countries across financial services, government, gaming and prediction markets, healthcare, telecom, AI, social media platforms, big tech, and e-commerce, Socure’s customer base “includes banks, HR payroll and workforce providers.”
Organizations use Socure to deliver certainty in “identity across onboarding, authentication, age verification, payments, workforce verification, and regulatory compliance.”
Qlarifi is the so-called real-time BNPL consumer credit database.
It provides insightful underwriting data for BNPL lenders “via consumers’ transaction history.”
With richer data, lenders can make more “informed underwriting decisions – helping both BNPL providers and consumers.”
As covered, Socure is the platform for digital identity verification.
Its predictive analytics platform applies artificial intelligence and machine learning technology with “online/offline data intelligence from email, phone address, IP, device, velocity, and the broader internet to verify identities in real time.”