There is no layer to check against
Zambia has no national verification layer, so the check falls back on paper, a phone call, or nothing at all.
Know who is on your books before the money leaves.
We check the identity and the business against the record, and give you the evidence behind every field. The decision stays yours.
The gap
A name, a number and a photocopy is not verification. It is hope.
The loss arrives late
A borrower who was never who they claimed to be does not default politely. They draw down, then stop answering.
Chanzelu closes that gap
One connection, one audit trail, evidence behind every field. The risk you carry becomes a risk you chose.
How it works
One request. Evidence back in seconds.
No integration project, no data migration, no committee. Send what your customer already gave you and read the answer straight back.
STAGE 01
Tell us who's in front of you
Give us what your customer already gave you: name, identity number, date of birth, or a company registration number. One request, from your app or your core system.
STAGE 02
We resolve it against the record
Each field is compared against the registers we hold connections to, then scored for the near-misses real data produces: a shortened first name, a transposed digit, a reversed name order.
STAGE 03
You decide, with the evidence in hand
We do not tell you yes or no. We tell you what we found: a result per field, a confidence, a written reason, a source and a timestamp. You decide how much risk this one is worth carrying.
What we check
Three questions worth answering before you take the risk.
We built these in the order they matter. You cannot price a loan to someone whose name you have not confirmed, and you cannot trust a company account without knowing who controls it.
Live now
Identity verification
Know that a person is who they say they are before you onboard them. Chanzelu checks the name and identity details they gave you against the record and hands back a result for each field: evidence you weigh, not a single verdict you're asked to trust blindly.
- Name matching that survives real life: shortened names, reversed order, misspellings and phonetic variants are scored, not rejected.
- Identity document checks on NRC and passport details, including format and structural validity before a lookup is even spent.
- Cross-checks of date of birth and issue details against the identity number supplied.
- A reason for every outcome, in words, so your analyst knows what to ask the customer next.
In build
Business verification
Know the company behind the account, and the people behind the company, before you take them on as a counterparty. Chanzelu queries PACRA directly to confirm that a business exists, stands in good order, and is controlled by the people named on your application.
- Registration and standing straight from PACRA: legal name, number, date, type and current status.
- Directors and shareholders listed and, where you need it, each one run through the identity check as an individual.
- Ownership mapped through holding layers to the people who actually control the business.
- Change alerts on entities you already onboarded, so a quiet change of directors does not go unnoticed.
Next up
Credit decisioning
Most Zambians have no credit file. That does not mean they have no credit history. Chanzelu is building an alternative score from the evidence people already generate every month, with their consent, so a thin file stops being an automatic no. The score is ours to build; what you do with it is yours to decide.
- Income and affordability read from payslips and bank statements: stability, deductions, real disposable income.
- Mobile money behaviour: inflows, float held through the month, and how a customer handles a lean week.
- Mobile network signals, subject to operator partnerships we are still negotiating: top-up frequency, value and how long a line has been held.
- Scores you can explain, with the weight of each factor shown, because a credit committee cannot approve what it cannot account for.
Safeguards
Holding this data is a duty, not an asset.
We are asking institutions to route their most sensitive questions through us. So the handling has to stand up to your own audit, not just to ours. Here is what we commit to, in plain terms.
You stay the controller
You hold the customer relationship and the lawful basis for the check. Chanzelu acts on your instruction and does not run searches of its own, on anyone, for any other purpose.
Everything is on the record
Who ran a check, on whom, when, from where, and what came back. The log is yours, it is exportable, and it is written to be read by an auditor years later.
Governed by Zambian law
Handled in line with the Data Protection Act No. 3 of 2021. Your obligations do not get exported when you connect to us, and what we hold about a check is a pseudonymous audit row, never the customer's name, identifiers or the record that came back.
We do not keep the identifiers
Traffic is encrypted in transit. The bigger safeguard is what we never write down: no name, no NRC, no date of birth, no returned record. The audit trail proves a check happened without restating who it was about.
We do not sell your customers
Your queries are not a product. We do not resell customer records, we do not build a marketing file out of them, and we do not pass them to another lender.
Answers keep their evidence
Results carry their source and the moment they were taken. A decision made today can be reconstructed exactly as it stood, long after the file has closed.
Data protection
What a compliance review actually needs to see.
Before the safeguards get put into your own words, here is the record straight, in the terms your own reviewer will be looking for.
Legal basisData Protection Act No. 3 of 2021 (Zambia)
Data heldNo personal data about the person being checked. Verification detail is never stored; the audit row we keep is pseudonymous (see Retained, below).
Registers queriedLenco, for the mobile money account holder's name behind a phone number; the Zambia Revenue Authority, for the taxpayer name held against an NRC or a TPIN. The NRC card check reads the card image itself with a hosted vision reader and compares it against what the customer claimed, it does not query a national register. PACRA business registry queries are in build.
RetainedAn audit log of who ran a check, when, and what came back
Not retainedNames, NRC numbers, dates of birth, or the record returned
Access
Onboarding a first group of Zambian institutions.
We are working directly with early partners to shape coverage, latency and the response contract before opening more widely. If you carry identity risk in Zambia, start the conversation now.
- Commercial banksAccount opening and periodic refresh
- Microfinance and lendingBorrower identity before disbursement
- InsurancePolicyholder and claimant checks
- Mobile money and paymentsAgent and merchant onboarding
- Fintech and digital lendersStraight-through onboarding by API