Transforming Afreximbank’s Trade Compliance with the MANSA Due Diligence Platform

Africa's trade economy has always had strength. Thousands of businesses across the continent are active, viable, and ready to engage with global markets. What stood between them and the investment they deserved was not capability — it was verifiability.

Foreign institutions willing to invest in African businesses had no structured, reliable way to conduct due diligence. Compliance was slow, manual, and inconsistent. Without verified KYC profiles, African businesses were invisible to the global partners they were ready to work with not because they lacked merit, but because the infrastructure to surface that merit did not exist.

Afreximbank set out to build that infrastructure. MANSA — Africa's first centralized Customer Due Diligence platform — was their answer. Sumerge built it.

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The compliance officers, regulators, and businesses caught inside the existing process felt the friction at every step.

For compliance teams at financial institutions, verifying an African counterparty meant extensive manual research across fragmented, often unreliable sources. The process was long and ungoverned, with no standard framework to follow and no way to ensure consistent outcomes. The cost of doing it properly was high, and the risk of getting it wrong was higher.

For small and medium African businesses, the consequence was invisibility. Without verified KYC profiles, they could not present themselves credibly to foreign investors. European, American, and Asian institutions that might have been willing to engage had no reliable way to assess them, so they did not.

For regulators across the continent, monitoring trade transactions for financial crime at any meaningful scale was not achievable without shared infrastructure. The tools and data simply were not there.

The result was a cycle that kept African trade smaller than it needed to be: investors could not verify African businesses, so they did not invest; African businesses could not access that investment, so they could not grow.

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Sumerge designed and delivered MANSA as a secure, scalable platform powered by IBM technologies and AWS infrastructure.

The solution centralizes Customer Due Diligence data, trade information, and regulatory oversight within a single digital ecosystem. African entities can create and annually update their KYC profiles, which are reviewed by regulators and authenticated by Afreximbank before publication.

This ensures transparency, credibility, and compliance alignment. The platform includes:

-Fifty five African country profiles
-Thousands of standardized product classifications
-Investment climate data and economic indicators
-Integrated compliance and operations dashboards
-Embedded reporting and analytics capabilities
-Subscription models with secure payment gateway integration
-Two dedicated dashboards provide full visibility.

The business dashboard monitors subscribers and CDD profiles, while the operations dashboard tracks verification workflows prior to publishing.

MANSA was built to operate at continental scale, and the platform's reach reflects that ambition.

It was designed to serve 1.5 million contributors from African entities and 50 million investor subscribers globally. It brought 100,000 African regulators and verifiers into a shared compliance environment. Compliance costs were reduced by 40% through the shift from manual research to verified, centralized data.

The broader impact is about what becomes possible when the infrastructure exists. African businesses that previously had no credible way to present themselves to global investors now have verified profiles. Foreign institutions that previously could not assess African counterparties reliably now have a structured, trusted source to work from. Regulators across the continent now have tools to monitor trade finance transactions and act on financial crime.

Afreximbank's President Benedict Oramah described MANSA as part of the bank's initiative to promote trade and cooperation among African countries by enabling the exchange of financial and credit information, in cooperation with central banks across the continent.

That is the fuller picture of what this platform does: it does not just reduce compliance costs. It changes what African trade can look like

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• IBM WebSphere Portal

• IBM Web Content Manager (WCM)

• IBM FileNet

• IBM Cognos

• IBM Case Manager

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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Established in Abuja, Nigeria in 1993, Afreximbank was created for the purpose of  financing, promoting and expanding inter- and intra-African trade. With headquarters  in Cairo and branch offices throughout Africa, Afreximbank’ mission is to stimulate consistent growth of African trade while operating as a socially responsible financial institution and a center of excellence in African trade matters

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