African Cybersecurity Company to Help UK Firms Reopen African Payment Corridors as Fraud Liability Rules Tighten

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, which monitors more than $1 billion in transactions a month for over 100 financial institutions across Africa, said the UK launch targets electronic money institutions, remittance providers and cross-border payment fintechs.

The expansion comes as UK payment firms face heightened compliance costs from the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act’s failure-to-prevent-fraud offence, in force since September 2025[1], and the Payment Systems Regulator’s mandatory reimbursement scheme for authorised push payment fraud[2].

Correspondent banking relationships into Sub-Saharan Africa have fallen by more than a quarter over the past decade, while UK outbound remittances to the region exceed £4 billion a year[3]. The average cost of sending money from the UK to Sub-Saharan Africa is 8.5%, more than double the United Nations target of 3%, according to World Bank data[4,5].

Adhere offers real-time transaction monitoring, automated KYC and KYB orchestration, sanctions and politically exposed person screening, and audit-ready reporting calibrated for African payment infrastructure, including Nigerian Bank Verification Numbers and Kenyan mobile money systems. Customers report a 70% reduction in manual compliance workload and a 40% decrease in false-positive fraud alerts, the company said.

Gbemisola Osunrinde, Chief Executive Officer at Smartcomply, said: “African payment corridors should be a growth opportunity for the global financial system, not a liability. Compliance technology designed in New York or London cannot read Nigerian Bank Verification Numbers, understand mobile money flows in Kenya, or make sense of West African mule networks. We built Adhere to make that growth possible without compromising on compliance. The companies that get to participate in African growth are the ones with infrastructure built for African reality. We are bringing that infrastructure to the UK.”

Smartcomply was named a verified member of the Mastercard Engage Partner Program earlier this year[6]. In Nigeria, Adhere is aligned with the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Baseline Standards for Automated AML Solutions, published in March 2026[7].

Smartcomply said it is currently in discussions with UK electronic money institutions, remittance firms and banks.

FF NEWS TAKE

Smartcomply’s UK market entry is a calculated offensive by an African tech pioneer designed to monetize the regulatory fragmentation of cross-border payments. Rather than acting as a lightweight wrapper on top of existing Western compliance tools, Adhere handles more than $1 billion in monthly transaction volume for over 100 financial institutions from its headquarters in Lagos, Nigeria.

Under CEO Gbemisola Osunrinde, Smartcomply is converting local regulatory friction into an international strategic moat. In March 2026, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) issued its landmark Baseline Standards for Automated AML Solutions, fundamentally outlawing legacy manual compliance logs and forcing fintechs to adopt real-time, technology-driven transaction screening. Because Adhere was engineered natively to meet these stringent requirements, it gives UK electronic money institutions instant compliance alignment across both ends of the transactional corridor. Reinforced by its recent verification within the global Mastercard Engage Partner Program, Smartcomply is demonstrating that the most effective way to eliminate the “Africa Risk Premium” isn’t through blanket financial exclusion, but by deploying highly specialized, hyper-localized codebases that understand the nuances of cross-border capital flows.

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