Nigeria’s Bank Verification Number (BVN): Did you know it's needed for KYC?

One of the things I love ❤️ about working at Avallone.io is how much new I am learning every day.

It is often our great customers that bring up issues that create learning. Today, I got a question regarding the Nigeria Bank Verification Number (BNV).

If you don’t know about BNV (I did not), the short story is that Nigeria has created a unique identifier of individuals called a Bank Verification Number (BNV).

To get a BNV, you need to show up physically at a bank and ID yourself. The bank will take your fingerprints and do a face scan. The BNV will be generated and linked to your biometric data.

The question I got was if we can help our customers' senior persons avoid meeting up physically as part of the KYC process. When reading about this, it seems like the physical presence is the key risk-mitigating action (probably also for practical reasons), so even though we at Avallone love to solve problems and digitize processes, this was a problem we could not solve 😔

If anyone out there knows more about BNV and if there is a solution to the problem, please let me know.

By the way, I see some advantages with this setup; it will definitely make identity theft more difficult and increase the quality of KYC for individuals. On the other hand, I can also see some data protection issues. I will maybe come back with my thoughts about this another day. Maybe this is the tomorrow of KYC?