Verify your users' identity in Nigeria (KYC)

Understand what level of KYC your product requires. Tier 1 (basic): phone number and BVN. Tier 2 (standard): BVN + NIN + address. Tier 3 (full): all above plus business documents and liveness check. CBN mandates different tiers for different financial product types.

Select your KYC provider. For Nigerian-focused BVN and NIN verification: Dojah or Prembly are cost-effective and well-documented. For pan-African biometric verification: Smile Identity is the most comprehensive.

Integrate BVN verification via Dojah's API. Request the user's BVN, call the Dojah BVN lookup endpoint, and verify the name and date of birth match what the user entered. This is the minimum KYC for most Nigerian fintech products.

Add NIN verification for higher-tier compliance. Dojah and Prembly both support NIN lookup and NIN-phone number linkage verification.

For address verification: use Dojah's address verification API which allows users to upload a utility bill or government document for automated extraction and review.

For liveness checks (selfie + ID matching): Smile Identity provides a React Native or web SDK that runs liveness detection and matches the selfie against the government ID photo.

For open banking data (income verification, account balance, transaction history): integrate Mono's account connect flow. Users authorise Mono to pull their bank statement data, which you can use for credit decisioning.

Store KYC records securely and comply with the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR). Never log raw BVN or NIN numbers in plaintext. Use encrypted storage and access controls.

Build a manual review queue for edge cases — mismatches, expired IDs, or blurry selfies. Automated KYC never achieves 100% pass rates on the first attempt.