Background... I am originally from Africa. As much as the internet has progressed and penetrated the continent, doing business online is still very limited. One of the major reasons in most countries (other than South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria) is identity. The identity providers that exist today mostly just accept passports and not local IDs. Unfortunately less than 10% of people have passports because they don't need one or it is nearly impossible to get.
So even though my cousins and friends back home have plenty of access to the internet now, their usage is mostly limited just social media and consumerism. They can't sign up for Airbnb, Upwork, banking and all that other good stuff that we can do. It is super frustrating really because they could really be more productive if their was inclusive identity verification.
By inclusive identity i mean verification that accommodates local IDs.
Which brings me to my second concern... disparity of local documents in these countries. Only a few nations have national IDs. Huge chunks of the populations use alternative IDs such as registration cards, provincial IDs etc. Because of this lack of a standard, online identity verification services do not bother integrating each of these.
So i have put in a lot of time to try and find a workaround solution for this that still meets KYC requirements.
Right now, it seems the opportunity lies with the mobile money operators. They already have KYC requirements standardized for all the local IDs because the laws require them to do so for each account. More than that, they already have a wide network of agents to verify these documents. They also have penetration rates of more than 90% in these countries as compared to passports.
I have had discussion with some of their executives and am still brainstorming how to leverage this reality. There are already some options i am considering, nothing solid yet.
But yes, it is taking up all my free time looking into this.
I am even contemplating taking some time off next summer to fully commit to this.
Something has got to change.