Building Resilience in Africa with zkTLS pt 1

Elo Mukoro
Sep 9
6 min read

Trust is one of Africa’s biggest barriers to financial growth. The African Development Bank estimates that the continent loses more than $580 billion every year to corruption and illicit capital outflows. This erosion of trust reduces confidence in institutions and forces financial organizations to spend heavily on verification, fraud prevention, and compliance instead of scaling their services.

*Sub-Saharan Africa’s average CPI score in 2023 was 33/100, one of the lowest globally. Source: Transparency International.*

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the average Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) score is just 33 out of 100, among the lowest of any global region. Low trust directly translates into higher costs: FinTechs are forced to build workarounds, rely on manual processes, and staff human verifiers instead of scaling efficiently.

The Costs of Manual Verification

Verification in Africa is still largely manual and highly vulnerable to fraud. The usual methods are:

Bank Statements in PDF or printouts that can easily be forged
Screenshots of transaction history thats shared via whatsapp or email
Physical documents that require human inspection

This reliance on a manual system is a direct response to a fear of fraud, but it creates a new set of problems. Financial data is fragmented across multiple sources: bank accounts, mobile money, crypto, cash and more. Even though 55% of Sub-Saharan Africans hold an online account, most banks or telcos expose limited to no APIs, making it nearly impossible to create a unified, verifiable digital record. The result: Organizations depend on human verifiers who can be poorly trained, or worse, willing to collude with the applicants for financial incentive.

This single point of failure leads directly to higher fraud losses, and wasted time/resources.

API Aggregators: Progress but Limited

The quest to solve this manual verification problem has led to the rise of API aggregators like Mono, who work to build the vision of open banking by collecting and standardizing financial data from various institutions. Their business model is based on getting partnerships with financial institutions to gain API access, allowing them to aggregate transaction histories and bank balances across markets like Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Ghana.

While this is a step in the right direction, there are many concerns that prevent it from becoming a scalable, pan-African solution:

Limited API Access: Despite the hope for open banking, most banks across the continent do not expose their APIs, even in the countries where API aggregators operate.
Regulatory Dependency: Business models hinge on shifting government policies or bank cooperation. One regulatory change can stall operations.
Legacy Technology: Many banks still operate on outdated legacy systems, making the integration of APIs a technically difficult, time-consuming, and expensive task.
Limited Geographic Coverage: Mono and similar providers operate in only a handful of countries. Out of 55 African nations, most remain unsupported.
Ongoing Lobbying Efforts: Maintaining these partnerships requires continuous lobbying and relationship management to ensure business operations can continue without interruption.
Invisible Income: Millions operate outside the banking system, earning via crypto wallets, mobile money, or gig platforms, which APIs often fail to capture.

Due to these risks, API-based integrations alone cannot solve Africa's financial trust deficit. The market requires a new, trustless approach that reduces reliance on third-party APIs and human-based verification.

User initiated verifications with zkTLs

Traditionally, proving financial data has meant relying on third parties like banks, mobile money providers, or government systems. The problem is that access is limited, slow, or not available at all. A new approach is using zero knowledge (zk) proofs where verification is handled by deterministic math instead of a human verifier.

There are many ways zk can be applied, for example verifying emails, passports, or digital IDs. But when it comes to financial records, the method with the best user experience for Africa is zkTLS (Zero Knowledge Transport Layer Security).

zkTLS proves that data came directly from a secure HTTPS connection without exposing a user’s login credentials.

In practice, if a business needs to verify something about a consumer, the consumer logs into the relevant platform and a verified snapshot of their account data can be shared. This confirms the authenticity and integrity of the data, while giving businesses the flexibility to either prove a fact (e.g. “income > $1,000”) or reveal the verified information itself.

Adding support for a new platform does not require lobbying or a bank partnership. If the platform is accessible via HTTPS, a zkTLS proof can be generated.

zkTLS tackles two of the biggest challenges in digital verification:

Trust – Proofs can be verified against authenticated data straight from a website’s server. This confirms the information is genuine and not tampered with.

Privacy – Instead of sharing sensitive login credentials or full account details, you only prove what’s needed, like your income, balance, or rating, while everything else stays private.

Adding this layer of verification opens up powerful real world applications. Example use cases include faster lending decisions, streamlined OTC trades, smoother cross border payments, and easy customer onboarding.

Practical Applications for Africa

Lending

Millions of people earn online as freelancers, gig workers, small business owners, and creators, yet they struggle to access credit. The problem is the lack of formal credit histories or standardized documents that banks require.

This gap is visible among Gen Z. Africa has the youngest population in the world with more than 200 million people aged 15–24. Many of them are financially active but remain invisible to traditional lenders.

With zkTLS, borrowers can log into their income generating platforms such as Upwork, YouTube, Binance, or a bank or mobile money account and generate cryptographic proofs of their earnings. Lenders can instantly verify not only how much was earned, but also where it came from, without relying on PDFs, screenshots, or human intermediaries.

OTC and Cross-border payments

Moving money across borders in and out of Africa is still expensive and slow. Stablecoin providers like Kotani Pay have cut settlement times from days to hours, but OTC trading, which accounts for about 60% of Kotani Pay’s volume, still depends on manual processes like PDF payment receipts.

As Felix, founder of Kotani Pay, put it: “The current manual process of verifying Proof of Payment PDFs is prone to delays and the risk of fraudulent documents, creating loopholes and slowing down settlement times.” The reliance on PDFs and manual confirmations makes disputes common and slows down high volume trades, leaving OTC desks exposed to fraud and inefficiency. With zkTLS, settlement times can be reduced from hours to minutes.

The scale of demand is clear.

Binance P2P alone generated $26 billion in transaction volume in Nigeria in a single year, serving both businesses and individuals. When the Nigerian government moved to shut Binance out, it triggered the rise of decentralized on/off-ramp models like Paycrest and Acrue. These platforms often rely on public API integrations, but APIs are limited in the volume they can safely process. zkTLS allows for the confirmation of manual bank transfers, allowing significantly larger transactions to flow through these decentralized networks without depending on fragile or politically vulnerable APIs.

Integrating zk into Africa’s exchange ecosystem makes it more resilient and less dependent on centralized corporate control. By adding cryptographic verification, OTC desks and cross-border providers can move money faster, reduce disputes, and build trust at scale.

Visas

In 2022, 30% of African Schengen visa applications were rejected compared to 17% worldwide. Some countries face even higher refusal rates: Nigeria (45%), Ghana (44%), and Senegal (42%).

Applicants are often required to submit printed bank statements or PDFs as evidence of financial stability. These documents are slow to process, prone to forgery, and frequently dismissed by embassies even when genuine. This leaves many young Africans, who earn digitally, locked out of international opportunities.

zkTLS changes the equation. Instead of printing statements, applicants can log in to their bank, mobile wallet, or digital platform and generate a cryptographic proof of their balance or income. A consulate could verify instantly that an applicant makes a certain amount and from what source. This has the potential to streamline visa applications and create more globally accessible opportunities for Africans.

ZK to the World

Africa’s financial system is full of opportunity, but trust remains the bottleneck. From lending to cross-border payments, OTC trading, visa applications, and more, the story is the same: verification is manual, fraud is common, and growth is slowed by reliance on third party APIs and paper-based processes. Africa is also the youngest continent, with most of its youth digitally active, earning, trading, and transacting online, yet still invisible to formal financial institutions. Without reliable ways to verify their activity, millions are locked out of credit, mobility, and participation in global trade.

zkTLS offers a path forward, and Cr3dentials is taking concrete steps to deliver it. By building localized integrations with banks, mobile money providers, and digital platforms across Africa, we are enabling verifiable proofs that power a wide range of financial use cases. The future of African finance will not be built on paperwork and PDFs. It will be built on systems that are decentralized, verifiable, and resilient.