Socure, an AI-first platform for global identity, compliance, and risk decisioning, has acquired Qlarifi, a real-time Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) consumer credit database. This acquisition establishes the industry’s first unified infrastructure for identity verification, anti-fraud measures, and BNPL credit, building upon the framework of Socure’s First Party Fraud Consortium.
This integration aims to enable consumers to build credit through BNPL repayment, reduce first-party fraud losses for lenders and merchants by up to 70 percent, and provide the transparency sought by regulators as BNPL experiences global growth. Historically, BNPL transactions have operated outside traditional credit reporting systems, creating data blind spots that posed risks to both consumers and lenders. Traditional credit bureaus were not designed to handle high-frequency, small-dollar lending decisions made in milliseconds and struggled with ingesting granular repayment histories or accurately assigning tradelines due to outdated identity resolution technology. Such inaccuracies could restrict credit access for reliable consumers and heighten lender risk.
BNPL usage continues to expand rapidly, accounting for nearly 6% of all e-commerce transactions in the United States and growing at over 20% annually. Globally, BNPL spending is projected to exceed $700 billion by 2028. Despite this growth, the underlying infrastructure needed for responsible expansion has been insufficient, leaving lenders without cross-provider visibility, consumers without a means to build credit, and merchants vulnerable to increased fraud-driven losses.
Qlarifi, founded by BNPL leaders from Klarna and Zip, was developed to help lenders protect consumers from overextension. Its platform provides BNPL providers with insights to safely expand services for trusted customers while identifying high-risk behaviors such as loan stacking and first-party fraud. Qlarifi’s technology has already demonstrated impact in a pilot program conducted in Europe.
Alex Naughton, Co-founder and CEO of Qlarifi, stated, “We built Qlarifi to solve a very real pain point: the lack of infrastructure to protect consumers from overextending themselves across multiple BNPL providers. By joining forces with Socure, we now have their commercial scale, balance sheet, and analytics to build the infrastructure that will enable responsible lending at scale and demonstrate to regulators that the industry can protect consumers while expanding access to credit.”
By combining Qlarifi’s real-time repayment data aggregation capabilities across multiple BNPL providers with Socure’s Identity Graph intelligence and RiskOS decisioning engine, lenders gain a single decisioning fabric capable of validating applicant identity across providers, identifying cross-provider loan stacking and overextension, significantly reducing first-party fraud losses, enabling thin-file consumers to access responsible credit, and lowering fraud-driven payment costs for merchants.
Johnny Ayers, CEO and Founder of Socure, commented, “BNPL has outgrown the legacy systems that were never designed to support their innovative lending products. 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.”
This acquisition represents a step for Socure, which provides solutions via RiskOS™ for consumer verification, business verification, age assurance, credit underwriting, fraud prevention, anti-money laundering compliance, and ongoing authentication. Socure serves more than 3,000 customers across 190+ countries, including 18 of the top 20 banks and over 600 fintech companies.
