Socure Acquires Qlarifi, Establishing the First Real-Time BNPL Credit System and Setting a New Standard for Safe, Low-Cost Payments

With Qlarifi, Socure now combines industry-leading identity verification and risk decisioning with BNPL-specific visibility to help lenders say “yes” to good customers faster while meeting regulatory calls for increased consumer protection

INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Socure, the AI-first platform for global identity, compliance and risk decisioning, today announced it has acquired Qlarifi, the first real-time Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) consumer credit database.

The combination establishes the industry’s first unified identity, anti-fraud, and BNPL credit infrastructure, building on the huge successes of Socure’s First Party Fraud Consortium. This enables consumers to build credit responsibly through BNPL repayment, reduces first party fraud losses for lenders and merchants by up to 70 percent, while providing the transparency regulators have been seeking as BNPL becomes one of the fastest growing forms of credit globally.

Unlike traditional credit products, BNPL transactions have historically operated outside conventional credit reporting systems, creating blind spots that put both consumers and lenders at risk. Traditional credit bureaus were not designed for high frequency, small dollar lending decisions made in milliseconds. They struggle to ingest granular repayment histories and often misassign tradelines due to outdated entity resolution and identity linking technology. These errors can reduce credit access for trustworthy consumers while creating blind spots that increase lender risk.

BNPL usage continues to accelerate. In the United States, BNPL now accounts for nearly 6% of all e-commerce transactions and is growing at more than 20% annually. Globally, BNPL spend is projected to exceed $700Bn by 2028. Despite this rapid adoption, the underlying infrastructure needed to support responsible growth has lagged, leaving lenders without cross provider visibility, consumers without a path to build credit, and merchants exposed to rising fraud driven losses.

Enter Qlarifi: Founded by a team of BNPL leaders from Klarna and Zip, Qlarifi is purpose-built to help lenders protect consumers from overextension. The platform gives BNPL providers the insight needed to safely expand services for trusted customers while pinpointing high-risk behavior such as loan stacking and first-party fraud. Qlarifi's technology has already demonstrated significant impact in its first-of-its-kind pilot in Europe.

"We built Qlarifi to solve a very real pain point: the lack of infrastructure to protect consumers from overextending themselves across multiple BNPL providers," said Alex Naughton, Co-founder and CEO of Qlarifi. "By joining forces with Socure, we now have their tremendous commercial scale, balance sheet, and world-class analytics behind us to build the infrastructure that will enable responsible lending at scale and demonstrate to regulators that the industry can protect consumers while expanding access to credit."

By integrating Qlarifi's ability to aggregate real-time repayment data across multiple BNPL providers with Socure's industry-leading Identity Graph intelligence and RiskOS decisioning engine, lenders gain a single decisioning fabric capable of:

• Validating that the applicant is the same real person across multiple BNPL providers
• Identifying cross-provider loan stacking and overextension
• Significantly reducing first party fraud losses
• Enabling thin file consumers to access responsible credit
• Lowering fraud driven payment costs for merchants

“BNPL has outgrown the legacy systems that were never designed to support their innovative lending products,” said Johnny Ayers, CEO and Founder of Socure. “At the same time, consumers deserve a safe path to build credit, lenders need real time visibility to reduce fraud and risk, and regulators require transparency and reporting. Qlarifi built the first real-time BNPL consumer credit database, and by combining it with SocureID and our Identity Graph, we can deliver the unified infrastructure that all market participants have been asking for.”

The acquisition serves as a natural next-step for Socure, the world’s leading decisioning platform, which now provides solutions via RiskOS™ for consumer verification, business verification, age assurance, credit underwriting, fraud prevention, anti-money laundering compliance and ongoing authentication.

About Socure
Socure is the leading platform for digital identity verification, compliance and fraud prevention solutions, trusted by the largest enterprises and government agencies to build trust and mitigate risk. Leveraging AI and machine learning, Socure’s industry-leading platform achieves the highest accuracy, automation, and capture rates available in the industry.

Serving more than 3,000 customers and 190+ countries across financial services, government, gaming and prediction markets, healthcare, telecom, AI, social media platforms, big tech, and e-commerce, Socure’s customer base includes 18 of the top 20 banks, 4 of the Mag 7, the largest HR payroll and workforce providers, 6 of the 7 largest sportsbook and prediction market operators, 74 organizations across the public sector, and more than 600 fintechs.

Leading organizations trust Socure to deliver certainty in identity across onboarding, authentication, age verification, payments, workforce verification, and regulatory compliance. Learn more at www.socure.com.

About Qlarifi
Qlarifi is the first real-time BNPL consumer credit database. It provides insightful underwriting data for BNPL lenders via consumers' transaction history. With richer data, lenders can make more informed underwriting decisions - helping both BNPL providers and consumers. For more information, visit www.qlarifi.com.