With Qlarifi, Socure now combines industry-leading identity verification and 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-first platform for global identity, compliance and risk decisioning, announced it has acquired Qlarifi, the first real-time Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) consumer credit database.
The combination establishes the industry’s first unified identity, anti-fraud, and BNPL credit infrastructure, building on the huge successes of Socure’s First Party Fraud Consortium. This enables consumers to build credit responsibly through 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 historically 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 They struggle to ingest granular repayment histories and often misassign tradelines due to outdated entity resolution and identity linking technology.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.
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BNPL usage continues to accelerate. In the United States, BNPL now accounts for nearly 6% of all e-commerce transactions and is growing at more than 20% annually. Globally, BNPL spend is projected to exceed $700Bn by 2028. Despite this rapid adoption, the underlying infrastructure needed to support responsible growth has lagged, leaving lenders without cross provider visibility, consumers without a path to build credit, and merchants exposed to rising fraud driven losses.
Enter Qlarifi: Founded by a team of BNPL leaders from Klarna and Zip, Qlarifi is purpose-built to help lenders protect consumers from overextension. The platform gives BNPL providers the insight needed to safely expand services for trusted customers while pinpointing high-risk behavior such as loan stacking and first-party fraud. Qlarifi’s technology has already demonstrated significant impact in its first-of-its-kind pilot in Europe.
“We built Qlarifi to solve a very real pain point: the lack of infrastructure to protect consumers from overextending themselves across multiple BNPL providers,” said Alex Naughton, Co-founder and CEO of Qlarifi. “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.”
By integrating Qlarifi’s ability to aggregate real-time repayment data across multiple BNPL providers with Socure’s industry-leading 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
“BNPL has outgrown the legacy systems that were never designed to support their innovative lending products,” said Johnny Ayers, CEO and Founder of Socure. “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.”
The acquisition serves as a natural next-step for Socure, the world’s leading 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.