Smartcomply, a Nigerian cybersecurity and compliance company, has joined the PCI Security Standards Council, the global body that sets payment-data security standards, as a participating organisation. It is among the first Nigerian firms in the category to help shape those standards, and the move follows the company’s recent expansion into the United Kingdom.
From Lagos to global standards
Founded in 2021 as a governance, risk and compliance business, Smartcomply launched its flagship product, Adhere, in 2024. The UK expansion targets electronic money institutions, remittance firms, neobanks and cross-border fintechs operating across African payment corridors, including Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa and Rwanda. Joining a global standards council on top of that signals an ambition beyond home-market compliance.
The Adhere bet
Adhere is an AI-powered anti-money-laundering, know-your-customer and fraud-detection platform. It connects to financial institutions through an API, verifies users through local identity systems such as Nigeria’s Bank Verification Number and National Identification Number, monitors transactions in real time, and generates reports mapped to local rules. The company’s argument is one of origin: where competitors built systems for Western markets and adapted them for Africa, Adhere was built from firsthand experience of African mobile money, local identity verification and regional fraud patterns, which it says yields better accuracy and fewer false positives on African transactions.
Why it matters
Two shifts make this notable. First, African regulators are tightening anti-money-laundering and transaction-monitoring rules, with Nigeria’s central bank recently setting baseline standards that formally recognise AI and machine learning for monitoring financial crime. That raises the compliance burden, and the demand for tools to meet it. Second, and more strategically, the direction of travel is reversing. For years, foreign compliance software flowed into Africa. Here, an African-built platform is moving outward, into one of the world’s most heavily regulated financial markets and into the rooms where global standards are written.
For African cybersecurity, that is the more interesting story than any single round: technology built for local conditions becoming an export, with the continent’s hard-won expertise in fraud and identity treated as an advantage rather than a gap.
