Smartcomply, a Nigerian compliance and cybersecurity startup, is expanding into the United Kingdom, targeting Electronic Money Institutions (EMIs), remittance firms, neobanks, and cross-border payment fintechs.
The startup is entering the market with Adhere, its AI-powered anti-money laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC), and fraud-detection platform, which it said was designed for African financial systems and datasets. Its UK expansion focuses on the Nigerian, Kenyan, Ghanaian, South African, and Rwandan payment corridors.
The expansion comes as African regulators move to tighten anti-money laundering controls and transaction monitoring requirements. In March, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) introduced baseline standards for automated AML solutions, formally recognising artificial intelligence and machine learning as tools for monitoring financial crime.
“African payment corridors should be a growth opportunity for the global financial system, not a liability,” said Gbemisola Osunrinde, the company’s chief executive officer. “Smartcomply’s UK presence means that for the first time, UK fintechs and banks have direct access to an AML platform that understands African data the way it should be understood: from the inside out.”
Founded in 2021, Smartcomply initially launched as a governance, risk, and compliance company for African businesses. The company later expanded into financial crime monitoring with Adhere in 2024 after identifying what it described as an infrastructure gap in monitoring African financial transactions.
According to Osunrinde, when foreign transaction monitoring systems do not understand African transaction behaviour, it can create false-positive fraud alerts and force institutions into manual compliance reviews. “Many (financial institutions) have resorted to de-risking or simply pulling out of the African corridor entirely,” she said.
Smartcomply said Adhere was built to address those problems through direct integrations with local identity infrastructure, real-time transaction monitoring, behavioural analysis, and automated compliance reporting.
Adhere integrates into the backend systems of financial institutions through an Application Programming Interface (API), the company said. Once financial institutions connect to the platform, Adhere can verify customers through local identity systems such as Nigeria’s Bank Verification Number (BVN) and National Identification Number (NIN) databases.
Osunrinde said Adhere works with regional partners across East and Francophone Africa to access identity datasets used to verify customer information in those markets. She added that Smartcomply maintains direct integrations with local identity infrastructure across Africa to support user verification and generate risk scores.
According to the company, the platform’s machine learning models also analyse transaction behaviour across mobile payments to distinguish legitimate high-volume transactions from suspicious financial behaviour. Transactions flagged as irregular can be paused and escalated to an internal fraud analyst for manual review before processing is completed.
Adhere generates audit-ready compliance reports mapped to local regulatory frameworks, allowing institutions to automate portions of their reporting, the company added.
Smartcomply said Adhere uses a flexible pricing model that allows customers to select the specific compliance services they need. According to Osunrinde, some customers subscribe to specific compliance tools such as transaction monitoring or KYC. Others can opt for more enterprise access across the platform and API-based pricing.
The company said Adhere serves more than 100 businesses across regulated industries in Africa and beyond and currently monitors over $1 billion in monthly transaction volume across its customers operating in African markets.
In the UK market, Smartcomply would compete with established compliance and identity verification providers such as ComplyAdvantage, Sumsub, and Smile Identity. However, the company argued that existing compliance systems were designed primarily around European or North American financial behaviour and later adapted for African markets.
“We built Adhere because we lived the problem. Compliance technology designed in New York or London cannot read Nigerian Bank Verification Numbers, cannot understand mobile money flows in Kenya, and cannot make sense of West African mule networks,” said Anita Ajalla, Chief Technology Officer of Smartcomply. “The companies that get to participate in African growth are the ones with infrastructure built for African reality. We are bringing that infrastructure to London”
The company said it is expanding its compliance infrastructure across East and Francophone Africa, with plans to deepen its presence in Rwanda and Côte d’Ivoire in 2026.
