Ibukun Ogunwemimo
Compliance Team Lead, Blaaiz
Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Canada and Nigeria, Blaaiz is a cross-border payments and financial services platform built to connect Africa with the global financial system.
The company serves both retail consumers and businesses through its API-enabled payments infrastructure. Its offerings span international money transfers, multi-currency wallets, virtual bank accounts, crypto services, and a growing suite of B2B payment solutions. Blaaiz is building financial infrastructure designed to make cross-border transactions faster, more accessible, and easier to manage for individuals and businesses operating across multiple markets.
This is backed by a multi-jurisdictional regulatory footprint: Blaaiz is registered with the Bank of Canada as a Payment Service Provider under the Retail Payment Activities Act (RPAA), registered with FINTRAC in Canada as a Money Services Business, licensed as an International Money Transfer Operator (IMTO) by the Central Bank of Nigeria, and registered with FinCEN in the United States as a Money Services Business.
The Challenge
In Blaaiz's early stages, customer verification relied on a combination of manual document reviews without a fully automated verification process. While this approach was manageable at lower volumes, it became increasingly difficult to scale as the company expanded across multiple jurisdictions with its own KYC documentation standards, multilingual verification requirements, and jurisdiction-specific AML/CFT
regulatory expectations.
At the same time, Blaaiz needed to meet compliance obligations across several markets. This included customer due diligence (CDD), enhanced due diligence (EDD) for higher-risk users, PEP and sanctions screening, and regulatory reporting within strict timeframes.
As the platform grew, several challenges emerged:
- Slow manual onboarding that created friction for users and increased drop-off during registration
- Difficulty verifying a wide range of African and diaspora identity documents at scale
- Lack of integrated transaction monitoring alongside identity verification
- Increasing compliance and regulatory exposure as transaction volumes grew
- More complex onboarding requirements as Blaaiz expanded its business payment offerings
Ibukun Ogunwemimo
Compliance Team Lead at Blaaiz
What worked when we were onboarding a smaller number of users quickly became difficult to sustain at scale. We needed a way to maintain strong compliance standards while delivering a faster and more consistent onboarding experience across multiple markets.
The combination of rapid user growth and multi-jurisdictional compliance requirements made it clear that a more automated and integrated approach to verification was necessary.
Why Sumsub?
The Blaaiz team discovered Sumsub during a structured evaluation of identity verification and compliance providers. As the company expanded across multiple markets, it needed a solution that could support both retail customers and business clients while meeting regulatory requirements across different jurisdictions.
Several factors influenced the decision:
- Broad coverage of African and international identity verification
- A unified compliance platform covering KYC, KYB, transaction monitoring and case management
- Alignment with regulatory requirements across the markets where Blaaiz operates
- Developer-friendly APIs and SDKs that fit into the company’s existing technology stack
- A commercial model that matched the company’s stage of growth
A key differentiator was the ability to support both individual and business onboarding within the same platform. As Blaaiz expanded its B2B products, the combination of KYC, KYB, and transaction monitoring provided a more streamlined approach to managing compliance across different customer segments.
The Solution
Blaaiz uses Sumsub across customer onboarding, business verification, and transaction monitoring, bringing key compliance workflows into a single platform.
Customer onboarding
For retail customers, Blaaiz uses Sumsub KYC to automate identity verification through Document Verification, AML Screening and Liveness checks. The process is embedded directly into the onboarding flow, helping users complete verification more quickly while reducing the need for manual review.
Business onboarding
As Blaaiz expanded its API and B2B offerings, business verification became an increasingly important part of the compliance process. Sumsub KYB helps the team verify business customers, review corporate documentation, identify beneficial owners, and conduct the checks required to onboard companies in a structured and scalable way.
Transaction monitoring
Beyond onboarding, Blaaiz uses Sumsub's Transaction Monitoring to screen transactions and support ongoing AML compliance. This adds a continuous monitoring layer that helps the team identify potential risks after a customer has been onboarded, rather than relying solely on checks performed at registration.
Ibukun Ogunwemimo
Compliance Team Lead at Blaaiz
For us at Blaaiz, one of the biggest advantages has been having these workflows connected within the same platform. User verification, business onboarding, and transaction monitoring operate as part of a single compliance process rather than separate systems.
The combination of KYC and Transaction Monitoring has been particularly valuable. By managing onboarding compliance and ongoing transaction monitoring within the same environment, Blaaiz has simplified day-to-day compliance operations, reduced manual work, and improved visibility across the customer lifecycle.
Implementation
The implementation was completed in approximately 1 week, exceeding Blaaiz’s expectations for speed. Sumsub’s API documentation and SDKs made integration straightforward, allowing the team to embed verification workflows into its existing infrastructure with minimal friction.
The compliance and engineering teams were able to go live quickly without significant technical challenges, making the rollout well suited to the pace of a fast-growing fintech.
The Results
Since implementing Sumsub, Blaaiz has been able to scale customer onboarding and transaction volumes without a proportional increase in compliance resources. The platform now supports automated KYC for users across more than 50 countries, helping the team maintain compliance while expanding into new markets.
Ibukun Ogunwemimo
Compliance Team Lead at Blaaiz
The ability to onboard and verify users at scale without growing the compliance team proportionally has been a significant cost and operational advantage. The speed of onboarding has also directly supported revenue growth by reducing drop-off during the sign-up journey.
One unexpected benefit was the speed of implementation. The team anticipated a much longer integration process, but Sumsub was deployed in just one week. The experience gave Blaaiz greater confidence in its ability to expand into new markets, knowing its compliance infrastructure could scale alongside the business.
Future plans
As Blaaiz extends its reach into new markets across Africa and around the world, it continues to build the regulatory foundation to support that growth responsibly. This means not only securing new licenses, but also evolving its compliance capabilities in step with the business sharpening due diligence for higher risk profiles, widening screening coverage, and refining transaction monitoring to meet the demands of scale.
These initiatives are designed to help Blaaiz uphold strong compliance standards while supporting the continued growth of its consumer, business, and cross-border payment products.