What Kenya and Canada Can Teach Each Other About Verifying Online Merchants

Financial fraud is a global issue, with some consistent features and threats that plague consumers and businesses no matter where they’re based. That’s why verifying online merchants is so important, as con artists are out to scam innocent e-commerce users, and the sophistication of their tactics is only increasing.

The chill expanse of Canada and the tropical climate of Kenya are a small taste of just how different these two countries are, before you even get into the economic and cultural gulf separating them. However, the need to verify online merchants persists in both places, and each nation has something to teach the other about handling this important process.

What Canada Can Learn from Kenya

Kenya, like many African nations, has adopted a mobile-first approach to all sorts of online interactions, including payment processing. That’s why you’ll find the use of merchant verification processes that prioritise speed and efficiency, because there’s a baseline assumption that everything will be handled from a smartphone using a mobile network connection, rather than a PC or laptop with fast, fixed-line Wi-Fi.

Canada needs to follow this lead as more and more of its residents also switch over to using mobile devices for a greater proportion of their interactions and transactions. Tap-and-pay methods for on-the-go purchases, whose popularity is fuelled in part by the country’s growing gig economy, make the need for lightweight yet effective online merchant verification a must.

Likewise, with the recent legalisation of locally regulated mobile gambling and online casino Canada has effectively created yet another market where verification must be handled with the utmost attention to security, while still minimising friction for end users.

What Kenya Can Learn from Canada

Flipping the direction of influence around, the main thing Kenya’s online merchant verification ecosystem needs to take from how things are handled in Canada relates to transparency. Specifically, organisations need to be clear about ownership, so that there’s no ambiguity about where e-commerce transactions end up and who stands to benefit from cross-border deals.

Cohesive handling of digital identity is also worth adopting, as in Canada there are systems like Interac Verified which let businesses easily authenticate merchant principals by leveraging trust already established with major domestic financial institutions and government portals. Kenya is still slightly held back by its entrenched reliance on physical documents being digitised as part of the authentication process, which introduces both speed issues as well as the greater potential for fraudulent submissions. Moving toward a federated, bank-led digital trust network would allow Kenyan merchants to prove their identity securely across multiple platforms without resubmitting raw ID documents to every new payment gateway.

Put simply, the option of combining Kenya’s speed and mobile-first inclusivity with Canada’s rigorous ownership verification and federated identity networks creates a model for modern online merchant verification that’s still secure and free from friction. Businesses and the customers they serve stand to benefit from these changes, while fraudsters will find it harder to establish a foothold on either continent as a result.