Cyber criminals are estimated to send around 3.4 billion emails daily, disguised to appear as if they are from reliable sources.
This amounts to more than one trillion phishing emails every year, an issue that most traditional encryption tools do not address. According to the FBI, scams using business emails have cost over $43 billion since 2016. Research from cybersecurity firm Check Point found that, on average, 1 out of every 15 organizations in Africa experienced a ransomware attempt every week during the first quarter of 2023.
VERA, a secure B2B communications platform, has partnered with cheqd, an identity and credential infrastructure, to develop a verifiable messaging platform for businesses in South Africa.
The rampant fraud and impersonation expose vulnerabilities that current encryption tools are not equipped to deal with. There is currently no global messaging platform that ensures the digital identity of the sender is genuine. VERA addresses this gap by issuing verifiable identities for businesses after conducting rigorous research on the company and its founder after retrieving the verifying information from government and banking registries.
By partnering with third-party providers to leverage public and private government and banking databases for verifying the identity of each business. This process ensures robust, multi-layered verification, allowing only authenticated and trusted entities to participate within the VERA ecosystem.
“VERA solves a genuine problem that affects ourselves and every company worldwide: invoice manipulation fraud. Every week we receive invoices by email attempting to defraud us. VERA’s solution ensures that every company and individual on the platform is verified. This is a great step towards our mission, where verified identity is seamlessly built into the fabric of how companies interact and collaborate,” said Fraser Edwards, Co-founder and CEO of cheqd.
By integrating cheqd’s advanced decentralized identity infrastructure, including support for Verifiable Credentials (VCs), AnonCreds, and DID-linked resources, VERA will enable trusted interactions at scale.
“At VERA, we believe secure communication should also be verifiable. cheqd’s infrastructure allows us to not only protect conversations but also to prove the identity of participants in a way that’s scalable, privacy-respecting, and future-ready. Together, we’re building the foundations for a more trusted digital economy, starting in Africa and scaling worldwide,” said Max Coleman, Co-Founder of VERA.
