In 2016, while wrapping up a business trip to Nigeria, startup investor Mark Straub called his wife to say he’d be home soon. But when he tried to check in for his flight at the international airport in Lagos, his ticket had been canceled. His credit card company had flagged the online booking — made from a Nigerian IP address — as fraudulent.

That missed flight sparked more than frustration. As Straub traveled across Africa meeting entrepreneurs, he heard similar stories from people locked out of digital services due to weak identity systems or a lack of formal documentation. Many couldn’t even open bank accounts because their identities couldn’t be verified.

Determined to solve this, Straub founded Smile ID, a company that builds facial recognition software development kits and APIs used by banks, fintechs and mobile network operators to verify users securely. Nearly a decade later, Smile ID has verified over 300 million identities across Africa, helping financial institutions onboard customers quickly, compliantly, and safely.

“Getting this right really makes a difference in people’s lives,” Straub says. “When we do our job, it means someone can get a loan, buy that smart phone or motorcycle, and start earning a living.”

Demand for fast, accurate identity verification is surging across the continent. Africa’s population is young, connected and increasingly digital — but also under threat from sophisticated cybercrime. AI-generated deepfakes, synthetic identities, and account takeovers now make up more than 30% of reported crime in some regions of East and West Africa, according to Interpol.

“We’re seeing a surge in digital fraud fueled by generative AI tools, deepfakes, account takeovers, synthetic identities and money laundering,” says Dennis Gamiello, Mastercard’s global head of Identity Solutions. “Organized fraud networks are using AI-generated identities to launch high-velocity attacks, and these threats are evolving more quickly than traditional defenses can keep up.”

To help counter that, Mastercard has deepened its strategic partnership with Smile ID, expanding digital identity solutions across Africa. The collaboration allows banks, fintechs, and mobile money operators to onboard users faster, reduce fraud and extend access to secure financial services.

“By combining Mastercard’s global identity expertise with Smile ID’s deep regional intelligence, we’re co-developing scalable solutions that drive inclusion, security and trust across the digital economy,” Gamiello says. “Secure digital identity isn’t just about technology. It’s about the opportunity it enables. Together, we’re opening the door to that opportunity for millions of people.”

Smile ID’s tools are now embedded in onboarding flows across 25 African countries, from Ghana to Uganda. A customer simply snaps a selfie through their bank’s app or website. Behind the scenes, Smile ID’s SDKs and APIs verify that face against a government-issued ID or national database — confirming the person’s identity in seconds.

Straub and his early engineering team designed the system to work even in low-bandwidth environments and with affordable smartphone cameras, ensuring accessibility across markets. Field testing with students in Kenya and Tanzania led to one critical breakthrough: Existing facial recognition systems, trained mostly on Eurocentric datasets, often failed to accurately detect African faces.

Smile ID responded by building its own proprietary algorithms trained on diverse African facial data, cameras and lighting conditions, dramatically improving accuracy and reducing bias. Early user attempts to fool these systems were almost comical — fraudsters used cardboard cutouts or took photos of sleeping people — but as threats have become extremely sophisticated, so have the defenses. Today, Smile ID’s technology includes active liveness detection certified by the International Organization for Standardization and anti-spoofing and fraud intelligence tools that assess user history.

To further strengthen verification, Smile ID also connects to national ID databases in 10 countries, validating user information against more than 700 million official records. These integrations can fuel powerful capabilities including real-time onboarding, and complement Mastercard's insights.

“In such a fragmented digital identity landscape, we want solutions that are compliant, interoperable, and easy to scale,” says Selin Bahadirli, Mastercard’s executive vice president for Services in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. “We’re putting real investment into platforms that work for everyone—especially in underserved regions. The goal is to make our services simple to use and easy to expand, no matter where you are.”

Straub sees the potential to expand across fast-digitizing markets, from the Middle East to Eastern Europe and the Pacific, where it can facilitate inclusion and cross-border trade.  But as the team innovates to stay ahead of audacious high-velocity cyberattacks, its mission extends beyond technology.

“This experience has reaffirmed my faith that most people in the world are honest,” he says. “Our job is to make it easy for honest people to succeed.”

As digital economies across Africa continue to grow toward an estimated $1.5 trillion by 2030, Smile ID is helping make that growth both secure and inclusive, one verified selfie at a time.