Finovate Blog

• Identity verification, compliance, and risk decisioning platform Socure has acquired Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) consumer credit database, Qlarifi. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
• The acquisition will create a unified, identity, anti-fraud BNPL credit infrastructure to help consumers build credit responsibly.
• New York-based Socure has been a Finovate alum since 2013. Johnny Ayers is Founder and CEO.

Global identity, compliance, and risk decisioning platform Socure has acquired real-time Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) consumer credit database, Qlarifi. The combination will create a unified identity, anti-fraud BNPL credit infrastructure helping consumers build credit responsibly, enabling lenders to confidently offer financing to more qualified customers, while providing transparency and increased consumer protection that regulators increasingly demand.

“BNPL has outgrown the legacy systems that were never designed to support their innovative lending products,” Socure Founder and CEO Johnny Ayers said. “At the same time, consumers deserve a safe path to build credit, lenders need real-time visibility to reduce fraud and risk, and regulators require transparency and reporting. Qlarifi built the first real-time BNPL consumer credit database, and by combining it with SocureID and our Identity Graph, we can deliver the unified infrastructure that all market participants have been asking for.”

Buy Now Pay Later is a growing component of the e-commerce ecosystem, with nearly 6% of all online transactions in the US relying on BNPL. With growth of more than 20% in the US, spending on BNPL is poised to top $700 billion globally by 2028. The rise of BNPL presents a challenge to both conventional credit reporting systems and infrastructure, however. These systems were not built for the kind of high frequency, small dollar amount lending decisions made in milliseconds that characterizes BNPL. Moreover, lenders have little visibility into the creditworthiness of borrowers, especially when it comes to cross provider visibility. This can expose merchants to significant losses and even increased fraud rates. Furthermore, unlike other credit schemes, BNPL also tends to leave consumers without a path to build credit.

In response, Qlarifi’s platform enables BNPL providers to safely extend financing to qualified customers, while identifying high-risk behavior such as loan stacking and financial crime such as first-party fraud. Already piloted effectively with its partners in Europe, Qlarifi is designed specifically to help lenders protect their customers from overextension and reduce the risk for BNPL providers. Integrated with Socure’s Identity Graph intelligence and RiskOS decisioning engine, lenders will be able to validate identity across BNPL providers, enable thin file customers (those with limited credit history) to access credit responsibly, and reduce fraud-related payment costs for merchants.

“We built Qlarifi to solve a very real pain point: the lack of infrastructure to protect consumers from overextending themselves across multiple BNPL providers,” Qlarifi CEO and Co-founder Alex Naughton said. “By joining forces with Socure, we now have their tremendous commercial scale, balance sheet, and world-class analytics behind us to build the infrastructure that will enable responsible lending at scale and demonstrate to regulators that the industry can protect consumers while expanding access to credit.”

Headquartered in London and founded in 2023, Qlarifi offers a BNPL consumer credit database, providing lenders with BNPL transaction history data to enable them to make more informed underwriting decisions. The solution helps consumers access the right credit products for their needs, provides enhanced fraud protection, and reduces scoring costs while enabling lenders to mitigate operational risks through an emphasis on data privacy and data minimization.

New York-based Socure has been a Finovate alum since 2013. The company leverages AI and machine learning, along with trusted online and offline data intelligence, to verify identities in real time. A leading digital identity verification and trust platform, Socure has more than 2,000 customers in financial services, e-commerce, healthcare, and other industries, and includes four of the top five banks, seven of the top 10 card issuers, and more than 250 of the largest fintechs among its clients.

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash