For years, fraud prevention across digital businesses in Africa was treated primarily as an onboarding issue.
If a platform could verify identity, confirm documents, and screen users at signup, it was considered protected. That approach made sense when platforms were smaller, activity was limited, and fraud was largely opportunistic.
But as digital businesses scale, this assumption no longer holds.
Today, a growing share of fraud emerges after onboarding — during transactions, account activity, and ongoing usage. Many teams only recognise this shift after losses, operational strain, or regulatory pressure expose gaps in their systems.
Growth changes where risk lives
Across Africa, digital platforms are processing more users, more transactions, and increasingly complex activity than ever before.
As scale increases:
- User behaviour becomes harder to predict
- Abuse patterns move beyond identity fraud
- Fraud actors adapt quickly to static controls
- Risk shifts from who a user is to what they do over time
In this environment, onboarding checks remain essential, but they are no longer sufficient on their own. Risk becomes a behavioural and systemic challenge, not just an identity one.
What the data is showing
Research published in The State of Fraud & Risk Intelligence in Africa 2025 highlights a consistent pattern across digital businesses: a significant portion of fraud exposure occurs after onboarding, not at the point of entry.
The research shows that many platforms still rely heavily on:
- One-time verification
- Static rules
- Manual reviews are triggered late in the user lifecycle
While these measures can catch obvious threats early, they struggle to detect how risk evolves as users interact with platforms over time.
The operational cost of static systems
When fraud moves beyond onboarding, the impact extends far beyond security teams.
Manual review queues grow faster than transaction volumes. False positives increase, disrupting legitimate users. Operations teams spend more time reacting than preventing. Compliance and audit issues surface late, often after damage has already occurred.
What looks like a fraud problem is often a systems problem. Many existing tools were built to answer one question well:
“Who is this user at signup?”
Very few were designed to continuously answer a more critical one:
“How is this user behaving over time, and how is that risk changing?”
Why continuous risk intelligence is becoming essential
As digital businesses mature, risk management needs to evolve from point-in-time checks to continuous visibility.
This means:
- Monitoring behavioural signals beyond onboarding
- Detecting changes in risk patterns early
- Reducing dependence on manual intervention
- Maintaining oversight as platforms grow in complexity
It is this shift that has led to the emergence of continuous risk intelligence approaches — systems designed to complement identity verification, fraud screening, and compliance controls rather than replace them.
Profiled Risk, Dojah’s continuous risk intelligence platform, was built in response to this reality. It helps digital businesses maintain ongoing visibility into behavioural risk as users interact with their platforms over time.
Rather than treating fraud as a single moment to be managed, continuous risk intelligence treats risk as a dynamic system that evolves with growth.
A new phase of risk management for African digital platforms
African digital businesses have entered a new phase of growth. Success is no longer defined only by user acquisition, but by the ability to:
- Sustain trust at scale
- Protect platforms as activity increases
- Manage risk without slowing innovation
In this phase, the question is no longer whether onboarding checks are important; it is what happens after onboarding, when behavior changes, and risk becomes harder to see.
Platforms that recognize this shift early will be better positioned to reduce fraud, manage operational strain, and build long-term digital trust.
About Dojah, Profiled Risk, and the Research
Dojah is an AI-powered fraud and risk infrastructure for Africa’s digital economy. The company enables global businesses to build trust with Africans securely using identity and fraud signals.
As fraud patterns have increasingly shifted beyond onboarding, Dojah developed Profiled Risk, a continuous risk intelligence platform designed to help businesses monitor behavioral risk across the full user lifecycle. Profiled Risk complements identity verification and fraud screening by providing ongoing visibility into how risk evolves as users transact, interact, and scale within digital platforms.
These insights are informed by Dojah’s recently published research report, The State of Fraud & Risk Intelligence in Africa 2025, which examines how fraud exposure, behavioral risk, and operational strain are changing as African digital businesses grow. The research draws on observed patterns across fintech, payments, marketplaces, and other digital platforms operating at scale.
Together, the research and Profiled Risk reflect a broader shift in how African digital businesses are approaching trust, growth, and risk management in real time.
