The challenge

Scalable onboarding for a growing fintech

Fintechs are disrupting the financial services landscape. Payments provider, iKhokha, is one of the fastest-growing in Africa, developing digital tools that help entrepreneurs start, run, and grow their businesses. As part of its mission, iKhokha plans to scale merchant onboarding at an ambitious pace, bringing more South African businesses into the digital economy each month.

However, manual processes created bottlenecks, hindering productivity efforts and scalability. Their onboarding processes were further stalled due to reliance on multiple third-party checks from different providers.

Why RelyComply

360° customer view to speed up digital onboarding 

To facilitate necessary compliance demands, from due diligence to transaction monitoring and reporting, iKhokha sought a secure and adaptable AML process that could consolidate customer data onto a single platform. Within this framework, they needed faster, more efficient onboarding while maintaining compliance with evolving regulatory standards.
To achieve their ambitious scaling goal, they needed to:

  • Consolidated customer insights for efficiency: RelyComply provided a unified compliance platform, integrating 80 critical data sources such as Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) lists, sanctions, and adverse media. This allowed iKhokha to automate merchant checks, minimising manual interventions and improving overall efficiency.
  • Flexible case management system: The platform introduced a consolidated case management system powered by seamless API integrations. This ensured a single source of truth for customer compliance data, streamlining workflows from onboarding to ongoing monitoring.
  • Enhanced adaptability for IT teams: The platform’s configurability empowered iKhokha’s IT teams with fine-tuned control over onboarding workflows. It ensured enhanced security and the ability to adjust compliance processes quickly to meet evolving regulatory demands.
  • Real-time customer data view: By leveraging GraphQL API and webhooks, iKhokha gained a real-time, unified view of customer data. This improved their ability to make proactive compliance decisions and maintain operational continuity.

Our impact

Reducing costs for greater growth initiatives

With RelyComply’s innovative platform, iKhokha successfully streamlined its compliance processes, ensuring operational efficiency and future-proofing against evolving regulatory challenges. Key outcomes included:

  • 50% reduction in onboarding time
  • Automatic approvals (where no case is created) increased from 31% to 86% (a 55% improvement).
  • 80% reduction in cost to screen merchants.

approvals

“Automation supplied by RelyComply has taken our customer-first commitment to the next level. Our team’s speed has been integral to our acceleration in the market, with the platform making sure no efficiency gaps remain in the overall onboarding process or in our regulatory efforts. With merchants able to use our payment solutions faster, we can further supplement services with an unrivalled user experience.”

– Alistair Dell, Head of Risk, iKhokha

Strengthening technical foundations for scalability

Building on the single case management tool to quickly work through cases, the elastic infrastructure of the RelyComply platform allowed the fintech team to increase their onboarding operations according to growing merchant numbers or peak periods of transaction monitoring, with configurable rules to meet the requirements of Visa Payment Facilitator and Marketplace Risk Guide.

The cloud-native solution provided high availability to assist the operational workflows of IT teams, reducing costs by R2.8 million. This ensured iKhokha can continue providing forward-driven solutions for their merchants while the automated solution can provide accurate, fast onboarding in the face of an uncertain regulatory future.