Socure has acquired Qlarifi, aiming to provide customers with a real-time BNPL credit system and optimise low-cost and secure payments.
Following this announcement, with Qlarifi, Socure will have the possibility to combine improved and secure identity verification and risk decisioning with BNPL-specific visibility in order to help lenders incorporate good customers faster while also meeting regulatory calls for increased consumer protection.
In addition, the overall combination is expected to establish a unified identity, anti-fraud, and BNPL credit infrastructure, building on Socure’s First Party Fraud Consortium. This initiative aims to enable consumers to build credit responsibly through the use of BNPL repayment, reduce first-party fraud losses for lenders and merchants by up to 70%, while also delivering transparency as BNPL becomes one of the growing forms of credit across the globe.
Delivering a secure and unified infrastructure for all market participants
According to the official press release, unlike traditional credit products, BNPL transactions have operated outside the conventional credit reporting systems, delivering blind spots that put both consumers and lenders at risk. At the same time, the traditional credit bureaus were not designed for high-frequency, small-dollar lending decisions made in a secure and efficient manner. Furthermore, they struggle to ingest granular repayment histories and often misassign tradelines because of the outdated entity resolution and identity linking technology, and these errors can reduce credit access for trustworthy consumers while also developing blind spots that increase lender risk.
Alongside this, BNPL usage continues to accelerate. In the United States, BNPL currently accounts for nearly 6% of all ecommerce transactions and is growing at more than 20% annually. Moreover, across the globe, BNPL spend is projected to exceed USD 700 billion by 2028. Despite this rapid adoption, the underlying infrastructure needed in order to support responsible growth has lagged, which leaves lenders without cross-provider visibility, consumers without a path to build credit, and merchants exposed to the overall rising fraud-driven losses.
With this in mind, through the process of 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 will be given the possibility to gain a single decisioning fabric capable of:
- Validating that the applicant is the same real person across several BNPL providers.
- Identifying cross-provider loan stacking and overextension.
- Significantly reducing the first-party fraud losses.
- Enabling thin file consumers to access responsible credit.
- Lowering the fraud-driven payment costs for merchants.
