Case Study: Chipper Cash thwarts fraud and verifies users in real time with Pinecone

Chipper Cash thwarts fraudsters in real-time with Pinecone

Chipper Cash, a fintech company providing cross-border money transfers in Africa, faced a significant challenge with fraudulent sign-ups. Fraudsters were exploiting new-user promotions by creating duplicate accounts with stolen or fake IDs, which a third-party verification service could not catch quickly enough. This resulted in a poor user experience for legitimate customers and caused Chipper Cash to lose 16% of its promo budget to fraud.

The company implemented a real-time identity verification solution using Pinecone's vector database. By converting user selfies into embeddings and using Pinecone for ultra-fast similarity searches, Chipper Cash can now detect duplicate accounts in under 200 milliseconds. This solution has reduced fraudulent sign-ups by 10x, increased verification accuracy to over 95% within two seconds, and ensured their promotion budget is spent on acquiring legitimate new users.

Chipper Cash

Samee Zahid

Director of Engineering