Why we ask
Nigerian financial regulation requires anyone offering these services to know who their customers are. That obligation exists to make money laundering, fraud and the financing of crime harder — and it is why we ask for identity information rather than simply taking your word for it.
Verification tiers
We ask for what a service actually requires, and no more. Lower tiers open quickly and carry lower limits; higher tiers take more verification and lift them.
- Basic. Your name, phone number and email. Enough for airtime, data, electricity and cable, at modest limits.
- Verified. Your BVN or NIN, checked against the issuing authority. Required for exam PINs, gift cards and higher limits.
- Full. A photograph matched against your identity record. Required for cryptocurrency, dollar cards, and the highest limits.
The tier a service requires is shown before you start it, not after. You are never asked for information a service does not need.
What we monitor
We monitor for patterns that are known signs of fraud or laundering — funds arriving and leaving immediately, activity that does not match how an account has behaved, or a sudden change in the device or location an account is used from.
Newly added funds are subject to a short settling period before they can be used for products that cannot be reversed. That is inconvenient by design: it is the window in which a fraudulent deposit is usually discovered.
What we may do
Where activity requires it, we may ask for further information, hold a transaction while we review it, or suspend an account. Where the law requires us to report something, we will, and in some cases we are prohibited from telling you that we have.
Any balance that is rightfully yours remains yours throughout, and is returned to you when a review concludes.
Your information
Identity information is encrypted before it is stored and is never written to our logs. How we handle it is set out in our Privacy Policy.
Questions
If you have been asked for something and are not sure why, write to hello@zenvapay.com. We would rather explain than leave you guessing.