Socure Buys Qlarifi to Build Real-Time BNPL Credit System

Socure, a leading AI-powered digital identity verification and fraud prevention platform, announced last Friday that it has acquired Qlarifi, the first real-time Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) consumer credit database.

According to the company’s announcement, the acquisition will allow it to establish the first real-time BNPL credit system and set 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,” the statement said.

This combination will establish the first unified identity, anti-fraud, and BNPL credit infrastructure in the industry, building on Socure’s highly successful First Party Fraud Consortium. Furthermore, this will allow users to build credit responsibly using BNPL repayment and reduce first-party fraud losses for lenders and merchants. The reduction is expected to go up to 70%, while at the same time, the team-up will provide the transparency in BNPL that regulators have been asking for.

Sokure believes that this will also allow BNPL to become one of the fastest-growing forms of credit in the world.

The Problem With BNPL

BNPL transactions differ from traditional credit products, which is why they were always kept out of the conventional credit-reporting system. This created blind spots that put users and lenders at risk. The reason for it is the fact that traditional credit bureaus were not designed for high-frequency, small-dollar lending decisions that users make on the spot.

Socure explained it by saying: “They struggle to ingest granular repayment histories and often misassign tradelines due to outdated entity resolution and identity linking technology.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.”

However, BNPL usage continues to accelerate in spite of this, and in the US, BNPL now accounts for almost 6% of all e-commerce transactions, while seeing over 20% annual growth.

Despite the rapid adoption – with projections saying that it will exceed $700 billion globally by 2028 – BNPL’s underlying infrastructure has lagged, which is a problem, as it needs to support this rapid growth. That leaves lenders without cross-provider visibility, while consumers lack a path to building credit.

Qlarifi Emerges As A Game Changer

Qlarifi can finally set the record straight by giving BNPL providers the insight needed to safely expand services for trusted customers, and at the same time, pinpoint high-risk behavior, such as loan stacking and first-party fraud.

Qlarifi’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Naughton, said that his team built Qlarifi to solve a very real pain point – the lack of infrastructure that would protect consumers from overextending themselves across multiple BNPL providers.

Meanwhile, Socure’s CEO and founder, Johnny Ayers, added that BNPL has outgrown the legacy systems that were not designed to support innovative leading products.

“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,” he added.