James Li
Founder & Spokesperson
UPay is a digital payments and crypto payment infrastructure platform focused on building compliant, scalable payment experiences for consumers and businesses across high-growth markets.
The company’s mission is to make digital assets more practical for everyday use by connecting crypto wallets, payment cards, crypto-to-fiat conversion, compliance workflows, and payment infrastructure into a single ecosystem.
Its offerings include the UPay Wallet for storing, managing, and spending digital assets, as well as virtual and physical payment cards that support online, in-store, travel, and ATM transactions. UPay also provides crypto-to-fiat payment capabilities, allowing users to spend digital assets through traditional payment rails.
On the business side, UPay offers payment infrastructure, card issuing support, onboarding solutions, merchant payments, and cross-border payment capabilities for merchants, SMEs, fintech platforms, Web3 companies, and other partners. .
The Challenge
As UPay expanded its services across multiple markets, verification became a critical part of the customer experience and compliance infrastructure.
Before Sumsub, onboarding relied more heavily on manual document reviews, fragmented workflows, and internal compliance checks. While this approach worked at an earlier stage, it became increasingly difficult to scale as user volumes and onboarding requirements grew.
For UPay Wallet, the company needed a faster and more consistent verification process for users opening accounts, applying for cards, and accessing crypto-to-fiat payment services. For UPay Business, it needed a more structured approach to company verification, authorized representative checks, merchant risk assessments, and compliance reviews.
The main challenges included:
- Slower onboarding and a growing manual review workload for compliance and operations teams
- Inconsistent approval decisions across different user profiles, business types, and regions
- Increasing fraud attempts involving forged, manipulated, or low-quality documents
- More complex onboarding requirements for business customers, including company verification and risk-based reviews
- Difficulty adapting compliance processes to different regulatory requirements across markets while maintaining audit readiness and ongoing monitoring
James Li
Founder & Spokesperson
The decision to move to Sumsub was driven by a clear business need – UPay could not scale customer acquisition, wallet adoption, business onboarding, and regional expansion on top of verification processes that depended too heavily on manual work.
Why Sumsub?
UPay evaluated a few global identity verification and compliance providers that could support both consumer and business onboarding.
For UPay Wallet, that meant identity verification, liveness checks, AML screening, and ongoing monitoring. For UPay Business, it included business verification, authorized representative checks, merchant risk reviews, and broader compliance workflows.
During the evaluation, UPay assessed providers across several areas:
- Identity verification accuracy and fraud prevention capabilities
- Global document coverage and localization support
- AML screening and ongoing monitoring solution
- Business verification and risk-based review workflows
- API flexibility and ease of integration
- Workflow automation and case management
- Scalability, support quality, and commercial fit
Ultimately, UPay needed a platform that could make onboarding faster, safer, and easier to scale. Sumsub stood out because it combined compliance capabilities with a smoother user experience.
The Solution
UPay uses Sumsub across customer onboarding, compliance, and risk operations, providing a shared verification framework for both its consumer and business products.
UPay Wallet
For UPay Wallet, Sumsub supports identity verification for users opening accounts, accessing wallet services, applying for payment cards, and using crypto-to-fiat payment features.
The onboarding flow combines document verification, liveness checks, AML screening, ongoing monitoring, and fraud prevention tools. Lower-risk users can complete verification through automated checks, while higher-risk cases are routed to internal compliance teams for additional review.
This helps UPay reduce onboarding friction, accelerate account activation, and deliver a more consistent onboarding experience as user volumes continue to grow.
UPay Business
For UPay Business, Sumsub supports onboarding and verification for merchants and business customers through company verification, authorized representative checks, merchant risk assessments, and risk-based compliance workflows.
The platform provides a more structured approach to business onboarding while helping the team manage increasingly complex compliance requirements across different customer types and markets.
One platform across compliance and risk
Across both products, the company manages verification, AML screening, ongoing monitoring, fraud prevention, workflow automation, and case management through a single platform.
For UPay, the value is not only in individual features, but in having consumer onboarding, business verification, and ongoing compliance managed within one connected framework. This has helped the company streamline decision-making, strengthen fraud prevention, and build a verification process that can scale alongside customer growth and regional expansion.
James Li
Founder & Spokesperson
As UPay grows, we need onboarding infrastructure that can support speed, compliance, and trust at the same time. Now, the platform gives us a more consistent process, stronger risk controls, and the confidence to scale without compromising the customer experience.
The Implementation
The implementation process was efficient and aligned well with UPay’s expectations. Sumsub’s flexible APIs, clear technical documentation, and responsive support enabled the team to integrate the platform with minimal disruption to product, compliance, operations, and risk teams.
The rollout allowed UPay to adopt a scalable verification setup quickly while maintaining the governance and controls required for regulated financial services.
The Results
Sumsub has helped UPay build a faster and more scalable verification process across both its consumer and business products. By automating routine tasks, the platform has reduced reliance on manual reviews while improving consistency in onboarding decisions.
The impact has been visible across several areas:
- Faster onboarding for UPay Wallet users
- More structured onboarding for UPay Business customers
- Reduced manual review workload
- Stronger fraud detection and AML screening
- Better case management for higher-risk users and businesses
- Improved audit readiness and support for regional compliance requirements
Beyond operational improvements, automation has helped UPay support growth without increasing compliance headcount at the same pace. Faster onboarding helps activate users sooner, while more consistent verification gives the team a stronger foundation for market expansion.
One unexpected benefit was the impact on internal operations. With product, compliance, operations, and risk teams working from the same verification framework, cross-functional collaboration became more consistent, and onboarding shifted from being an operational bottleneck to an important part of the overall customer experience.
Future plans
UPay’s next phase of growth is focused on expanding its digital payment ecosystem for both consumers and businesses. Key priorities include entering new regional markets, increasing UPay Wallet adoption, scaling UPay Business, strengthening cross-border payment corridors, and expanding the use of virtual and physical payment cards.
To support these plans, the company is exploring broader adoption of Sumsub capabilities, including advanced transaction monitoring, enhanced fraud intelligence, expanded ongoing monitoring, more sophisticated risk-based workflows, additional business verification capabilities, and greater automation for compliance and case management.
James Li
Founder & Spokesperson
For us, trust is not a supporting function. It is part of the infrastructure behind every customer relationship. With Sumsub, the company has built a faster, more scalable onboarding engine that supports UPay Wallet, UPay Business, and future market expansion without weakening compliance or fraud controls.
