Advance.ai and Ekata Partner on B2B Digital ID Offerings in Asia

Mastercard-owned eCommerce verification platform Ekata on Tuesday (Nov. 2) announced it has teamed with Singapore’s Advance.ai on a suite of B2B digital identity offerings and risk prevention solutions for customers in South and Southeast Asia, according to a Tech in Asia report.

Through the partnership, Ekata’s account opening platform will be incorporated into Advance.ai’s service offerings — which include digital identity verification, risk and credit scoring and digital lending — to deliver data and risk information to its customers.

Advance.ai, part of Advance Intelligence Group, works with companies in the banking, financial services, FinTech, payments, retail and eCommerce vertical markets. Mastercard acquired Ekata for $850 million in April.

“Together, we are creating a holistic, one-stop platform that accelerates and simplifies customer onboarding, risk management, and business transformation,” said Dong Shou, co-founder and CEO at Advance.ai, in the Tech in Asia report. “The end result for businesses is better resource efficiency, faster time to market, and lower costs.”

Related: Singapore Tech Startup ADVANCE.AI Snags $200M in Funding Round

Advance.ai uses artificial intelligence-based technology to offer digital identity verification, fraud detection and credit-scoring. The company works with more than 1,000 customers and is looking to grow beyond southeast Asia and India into Mexico and other countries.

Also read: Deep Dive: How Emerging Authentication Options Impact Digital Payments

Recent PYMNTS research shows that 60% of millennials and more than half of high-income earners reported increasing their online and mobile banking usage, and 24% of respondents would like to use multi-factor authentication, led by millennials and high-income earners.

Our research also shows that 38% of firms believe it is more important to use digital processes to authenticate customers’ identities now than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic began, including through the use of stronger authentication tools, such as Fast IDentity Online (FIDO).