African Cybersecurity Company to Help UK Firms Reopen African Payment Corridors as Fraud Liability Rules Tighten
Publish Date: 2026-05-27 05:41:00
Source Domain: ffnews.com
WHY THIS MATTERS
The expansion of Smartcomply into the United Kingdom, announced on May 26, 2026, introduces a critical piece of specialized financial infrastructure into the UK-to-Africa remittance pipeline. Worth over £4 billion annually, outbound remittances from the UK to Sub-Saharan Africa represent a massive economic engine. However, they are severely bogged down by structural inefficiencies; the corridor suffers from an average transaction cost of 8.5%—more than double the United Nations’ sustainable development target of 3%.
A primary driver of these inflated costs is “compliance panic.” UK Electronic Money Institutions (EMIs) and remittance providers operate under intense domestic regulatory stress following the enforcement of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act’s “failure-to-prevent-fraud” offense, which went into effect in September 2025, alongside the Payment Systems Regulator’s (PSR) mandatory reimbursement mandates for Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud. Because standard anti-money laundering (AML) software designed in London or New York lacks the specialized architecture to parse regional datasets—such as Nigerian Bank Verification Numbers (BVNs) or localized mobile money rails like Kenya’s M-Pesa—global banks have rapidly “de-risked,” cutting correspondent banking relationships to Sub-Saharan Africa by more than 25% over the past decade. Smartcomply’s specialized AI-powered compliance platform, Adhere, bridges this data deficit. By feeding native, deep corridor intelligence directly into UK payment workflows, it allows firms to aggressively expand their African transaction volumes while keeping risk management bulletproof.
Smartcomply, an African compliance and cybersecurity company, has opened operations in the UK and is making its AI-powered anti-money laundering platform, Adhere, available to British payment firms serving African markets.
The Lagos-headquartered company,…
