When Chimezie Emewulu speaks about digital identity, he is not reciting a venture pitch. He is describing a personal wound.

In August 2022, his father was kidnapped. The ransom demand came with a bank account number. The account was functional, active, and had been opened under a stolen identity, belonging to someone who had no knowledge it existed in their name.

The criminals had exploited, with ease, the single most consequential vulnerability in Africa’s financial system: the absence of a trustworthy, verifiable identity infrastructure.

“That experience transformed my professional endeavour into a life mission,” Emewulu said in a wide-ranging interview on Côte d’Ivoire’s national broadcaster, RTI 1.

The targets of that mission, fraudulent SIM swaps, ghost identity registrations, and illicit bank transfers, are not niche technology problems.

They are the daily operating environment of Africa’s financial criminals, and they persist because the foundation beneath Africa’s digital economy remains unfinished.

Emewulu’s company, Seamfix, has spent years building that foundation.

The Infrastructure Beneath the Economy

The argument Emewulu makes is architectural rather than technological. Digital identity, he contends, is not a product or a service, it is the trust layer without which no digital economy can function at scale.

“Moving from analogue to digital systems allows countries to build trust between both sides of any given transaction,” he said.

Without that trust layer, every digital interaction, opening a mobile money account, purchasing a SIM card, receiving agricultural financing, crossing a border, carries an unquantified fraud risk that either raises the cost of the transaction or excludes the poorest participants from it entirely.

In a post-COVID, AI-driven world, he argues, the traditional paper-based identity document is not merely inconvenient; it is structurally incompatible with what digital economies require.

Remote verification is impossible. Tamper-proof enrollment cannot be guaranteed. And the downstream consequences, as his family discovered in 2022, can be catastrophic.

From 10 Million to 100 Million: The Nigerian Scale Story

The scale of Seamfix’s work in Nigeria is one of the more remarkable untold stories in African technology.

Working with the Nigerian government, Seamfix introduced a mobile Android-based enrollment solution that helped scale the national identity database from under 10 million registered citizens to over 100 million, a tenfold expansion that repositioned Nigeria as one of the continent’s most significant digital identity deployments.

The approach was deliberately engineered for African conditions. Rather than replicating Western enrollment models that require citizens to visit fixed urban registration centres, Seamfix designed flexible Android applications that enrollment workers could carry directly into rural communities, ward by ward, village by village.

“You cannot build a national identity system that only works in Lagos,” is the implicit logic of the design. The rural farmer, the market trader three hours from the nearest city, the woman in a community without reliable electricity, their enrollment is not a secondary objective. It is the entire point.

This design philosophy extends to the software architecture itself. Emewulu is pointed in his critique of imported Western platforms that routinely fail in African deployments, not because African users are different, but because the platforms were not built to be resilient against the realities of intermittent power supply, low-bandwidth connectivity, and infrastructure conditions that European or North American engineers have never encountered.

“African problems are best solved by African engineers who possess local context,” he said. It is a position that is gaining ground across the continent’s technology policy community, and Seamfix’s track record provides one of the more substantive arguments for it.

The Passport Renewal Model: A Blueprint for Diaspora Services

Beyond domestic enrollment, Seamfix has demonstrated what sovereign digital identity infrastructure can do for Africa’s vast diaspora populations.

In a partnership with an African government, the company built a system enabling citizens across 83 countries to renew their international passports entirely via mobile phone, including biometric data collection, without visiting an embassy. The cost savings for citizens are significant.

The policy implications are broader: for the millions of Africans living and working abroad who maintain financial and civic ties to their home countries, frictionless remote identity verification is not a convenience, it is a prerequisite for meaningful participation in the digital economy their remittances help fund.

Cross-Border Payments: The PAPSS Integration

Emewulu’s most forward-looking disclosure concerns Seamfix’s work alongside the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System – PAPSS, the infrastructure designed to enable intra-African trade and payments without routing transactions through foreign correspondent banks.

Seamfix is building a governance transaction framework within the PAPSS ecosystem: infrastructure designed to monitor cross-border payments, enforce government transaction quotas, and prevent money laundering and terrorism financing.

In practical terms, this means that the trust layer Seamfix builds domestically, the verified identity underpinning a citizen’s financial profile, becomes portable across borders.

“When citizens travel across borders, their trust profile should securely travel ahead of them,” Emewulu told RTI 1.

The vision is of a continental identity handshake: a system in which a Nigerian entrepreneur doing business in Côte d’Ivoire, a Ghanaian trader clearing goods in Senegal, or a Kenyan professional accessing services in Rwanda carries a verified digital credential that financial and government institutions across the continent can trust.

This is not speculative infrastructure. It is the logical completion of what the African Continental Free Trade Area requires to function at scale.

Trade agreements liberalise market access on paper. Identity infrastructure makes that access real.

Who Owns the Data, and Who Must Protect It

On the question of data sovereignty, one of the most contested dimensions of digital identity deployment globally, Emewulu draws a firm line.

Private companies like Seamfix build the technology. They must never own or hold primary responsibility for citizen data. Data protection laws must be legislated, enforced, and managed entirely by the state. The government is the custodian. The technology company is the contractor.

This distinction matters because the commercial incentives of private data custodianship are structurally misaligned with the public interest in identity protection. Companies monetise data. Governments, when functioning effectively, protect citizens.

Conflating the two roles, as some public-private partnership models have done, creates accountability gaps that criminal networks are very good at exploiting.

The policy message to African governments is clear: commission the infrastructure, own the data, enforce the law.

Financing the Foundation From Within

On the question of capital, Emewulu offers a perspective that diverges from the standard development finance narrative.

Before African nations turn to external development partners for infrastructure investment, he argues, they should look inward, build sustainable business cases, challenge local talent to resolve structural obstacles, and demonstrate that the systems work before inviting external financing on someone else’s terms.

“Internal financing first” is not isolationism. It is a sequencing argument with real strategic logic. Countries that build digital identity infrastructure with domestic capital and domestic engineering talent own the outcome. Countries that build it on donor conditionalities and imported platforms often find that the system serves the financier’s reporting requirements better than the citizen’s needs.

Identity as a Right

Emewulu’s closing argument during the interview returns the conversation from infrastructure and economics to something more fundamental.

“Identity is a fundamental right, not a privilege,” he said. “No one should play god with it.”

It is a statement that carries weight precisely because he has seen what happens when that principle is violated, not in an abstract policy document, but in a bank account opened in a stranger’s name, used to extort a family, and traced back to a system that had never properly asked who anyone was.

Africa is building its digital economy on soil that, in too many places, has not yet been properly surveyed. Knowing who your citizens are, securely, verifiably, and with their consent, is not the endpoint of a development agenda. It is the starting point of one.

The infrastructure question is not whether Africa can afford to build it. It is whether it can afford not to.

(Chimezie Emewulu is the Group CEO of Seamfix, a Lagos-based digital identity and verification technology company operating across multiple African markets. The interview was conducted on RTI 1, Côte d’Ivoire’s national public broadcaster).

Since its inception in 2007, Seamfix has been providing companies with electronic tools and APIs to efficiently carry out end-to-end Know Your Customer (KYC) and document digitization processes via mobile and web channels during customer onboarding as well as real-time verification of the captured data – textual, biometric or identification documents.

It is the first software development company in Africa to receive ISO 27701:2019 PIMS certification among other things and one of the six Sun Microsystems Certified Partners (later renamed Oracle Partners) in  West Africa.

In a statement on Wednesday, the company highlighted some of its collaborations with leading financial institutions and telecommunications operators in terms of the solutions it has provided.

The company said it has collaborated with two leading financial institutions in 2008 to develop school management solutions for tertiary education. 

It has also partnered with MTN Nigeria, the country’s largest telco operator in providing identity management.

Recall that MTN was fined by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) in October 2015 for the delay in blocking the lines of over 5.2 million subscribers who had poor or incorrect SIM registration data captured by the telco.

While discussing the fine with the NCC, MTN had to solve the problem of bad SIM registration data and fix it so that it wouldn’t happen again or as frequently, especially on such a large scale.

“MTN then approached Seamfix to implement her KYC and BioSmart solutions to replace her existing systems and assist in resolving this massive challenge.”

According to Seamfix, the project was a huge success as it went live in a record 10 days, allowing the operator to meet government deadlines.

In its fifteen years of existence, Seamfix has distinguished itself in the industry by providing products and solutions that have impacted over 350 million people.

“Over 180 million identities have been enrolled into functional and foundational databases.”

It has created over 500 leaders who can be found all over the world, as well as solutions that serve at least a thousand organizations. 

Revealing some of its plans, Seamfix said has grand ambitions for the future some of which should be achieved on or before 2030.

“At a minimum, one billion people should have benefited from what we have to offer.

“We want to help our business partners increase their profits by intentionally developing 1,000 leaders, and at the very least, 10,000 companies should have benefited from our work.”

Seamfix has taken part in several CSR initiatives, the most recent of which was a collaboration with Slum2School to transform classrooms into early childhood and development centers for children in Tarkwa Bay.

With initial operations in Nigeria since 2021, Verified.africa is making good on its roadmap to achieve digital inclusion for all on the continent.

Since its inception, Verified Africa has recorded over 300 thousand digital identity verifications from a thousand plus businesses – enabling startups, banks and SMEs to confirm the true identity of people safely.

As Frank Atube pointed out in the company’s blog release, “Ghana, South Africa and Kenya represent key markets for Verified’s roadmap into continental dominance and with this launch, we’re thrilled to open our doors to businesses and individuals in three more countries – bringing the best of digital verification to your shores.”

The digital identity industry has never been more important to online security and customer trust. KYC (Know your customer) and AML (anti-money laundering) protocols have become stricter with governments looking to secure economic growth and eliminate loss from fraudulent transactions.

Verified.africa through the use of machine learning & facial recognition technologies, facilitates this process for both businesses and individuals by helping them eliminate fraud, onboard online customers faster, and meet KYC compliance in minutes.

With this expansion, businesses in Ghana, South Africa and Kenya can now enjoy these benefits as they easily verify IDs in real-time anywhere in Africa using any of verified.africa’s services.

From National IDs to Business Certificates to Tax IDs, Verified.africa connects to multiple databases of identity records across the continent to enable you to confirm that people are exactly who they say they are.

The company plans to expand its footprint to other African countries over the next 18 months, becoming the most widely used verification platform on the continent.

To get started with Verified.africa, you can sign up on their portal at verified.africa/signup. 

The Digital Token or Virtual NIN tokenization TechEconomy.ng gathered, was designed to replace the 11-digit NIN for every usage.  

This will help further to protect an individual’s data privacy via the use of an encrypted, coded representation (“disguised”) version of the NIN rather than actual NIN itself in day-to-day transactions.  

User IDs, QR codes and even verification log details on the MWS Mobile ID app are all types of NIN tokenization in that they all hide the NIN of the user. 

The National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) said that with the download of the NIN app from the Play or Apple Store which provides a digital ID, the card ID is no longer needed. 

Prof Isa Pantami, the minister of Communications and Digital Economy, made this known at a stakeholders’ workshop on the NIN Tokenisation Solution organised by the National Identity Management Commission in Abuja.

In this brief interview with TechEconomy.ng, Mr. Chimezie Emewulu, the Managing Director and Co-Founder of Seamfix, gives reasons the company is backing NIMC on the digital token for NIN slip. 

Seamfix is a people and software development company tailored towards improving the quality of opportunities available to organizations by digitizing their existing manual processes and automating their customer touchpoints for better service delivery to their end customers.  

Seamfix provides technology solutions and services that enable businesses across industries and geographies on their path to digital transformation, with focus on Customer Onboarding, Identity Management, Data Collection and Process Automation. 

Excerpt: 

How would Seamfix assess Nigeria’s national identity management system, so far? 

Chimezie: The National Identity Management system in Nigeria managed by NIMC has gone a long way from different political dispensations till date. 

Most recently under the leadership of Engr. Aliyu A. Aziz, the National Identity Management Commission has embraced innovative technologies from reputable Nigeria Companies to partner with the commission to achieve its mandate of enrolling Nigerians into the National Identity Database, one of such partnerships is with Seamfix Limited, a people and software development company.  

Seamfix partnered with NIMC to deliver mobile Android Enrollment software for the commission, before this strategic partnership, NIMC had only the stationary Windows enrollment software which had limitations in the areas of setup cost, mobility and accessibility to Nigerians in both semi-urban and rural areas. 

The idea of Android NIN enrollment software provided the much-needed access to digital inclusion to Nigerians worldwide. 

Secondly, NIMC through the Frontend enrollment partnership scheme authorized some private organizations to conduct NIN enrollment across multiple locations in Nigeria and Diaspora. This was another groundbreaking initiative under the current leadership of NIMC, these front-end partners armed with the NIMC Android Enrollment Software provided by Seamfix Limited recorded a geometric increase in the number of Nigerians enrolled into the NIDB to the tune of 60million in the space of just 1 year, which is a landmark achievement. 

In a bid to maintain continuous improvement, NIMC is constantly reviewing her backend systems responsible for NIN generation and expanding capacity to ensure all Nigerians are digitally included. 

With the news that NIN slip is now been replaced with digital token, do you think the country has built a robust system/infrastructure to manage this? 

Chimezie: Yes, the infrastructure and systems are there, the good thing about these systems is that they were developed by indigenous companies with a track record of delivering similar projects. 

I am very sure that proper planning has been put in place to manage the digital tokens, plans have also been made to scale these systems as adoption increases. 

According to the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, the government adopted the solution (digital token) to ensure the privacy of personal identifiable information of individuals during verification transactions and to reduce incidences of illegal retrieval, usage, transfer, and storage of NIN, do you think that purpose is achievable especially with the manner national identity system has been managed? 

Chimezie: The Idea of digital token is very achievable; data protection and privacy are a burning topic globally, and in ensuring best practices, NIMC is adopting the digital token initiative to ensure citizens’ data is properly protected. 

Seamfix is a key player in this space. So, do you think the Government needs to engage more with stakeholders in the identity space as it progresses with the implement digital ID tokenization process? 

Chimezie: I believe there’s always room for improvement when it comes to stakeholder engagement but this is something that we have seen an improvement in within the past years using our partnership with NIMC as an example. 

The goal is achievable! I expect the commencement to be in phases before a total rollout and deprecation of the existing verification process. I believe lessons have learnt in the first phase of the rollout and corrective measures will be taken as the initiative grows into maturity. 

What other views do you want to share about this? 

Chimezie: As a nation, we have made a lot of progress in our drive for a digital economy; this drive will most certainly reduce the case of insecurity, corruption, poor governance and encourage accountability. 

I want to commend all partners in the NIMC ecosystem for their doggedness and innovative mindset in driving this great turn around in the nation’s digital space. I also commend the leadership of the commission and the minister, for their leadership.