A recent investigation by Techpoint Africa highlighted an important challenge many fast-growing digital platforms face: How do you scale rapidly without weakening trust, controls, and operational governance?
According to the report, fake restaurants were successfully onboard-ed onto food delivery platforms using fabricated tax IDs, manipulated documents, stolen images, and personal bank accounts – and were able to go live and complete transactions.
Rather than viewing this purely as a platform problem, I see it as a broader digital transformation lesson for the industry.
As organizations digitize services and accelerate growth, technology leaders must think beyond product delivery and operational speed. Digital transformation without governance maturity eventually creates trust gaps.
Reading the report reminded me of my early days as a web application developer integrating payment gateways like Interswitch Webpay.
Back then, almost everything was manual.
Merchants filled physical forms, scanned documents, sent emails back and forth, and waited for approvals. In situations when the merchant does not have developers who could integrate the payment gateway, Interswitch would assign integration requests to verified partner companies , and internal QA teams at Interswitch reviewed implementations – they reviewed how states changed across operations, how errors were handled, and whether integrations followed expected standards etc, before you could go live (before your application is turned live).
Although, the process could take days or even weeks but many developers learnt payment integration best practices from those reviews alone.
The experience integrating VISA under Unified Payments was similar. Even PayPal documentation as far back as then, did more than explain endpoints and payloads. It guided developers on how integrations should be implemented properly.
Those processes were not just operational steps. They were governance controls.
Today, things have changed significantly.
Most payment platforms now automate onboarding, verification, testing, approvals, and even go-live processes – you can sign up, integrate, self-test, and switch yourself live within hours.
And honestly, that level of digitization is necessary. No modern platform can scale efficiently with entirely manual processes. While the older system relied heavily on manual governance, modern systems must encode governance into software itself.
I sometimes ask myself: Are organizations scaling governance at the same pace they are scaling technology?
That is why the report caught my attention, as it is one of the challenges that naturally comes with digital transformation at scale. Verification can no longer be treated as a separate operational activity. It has to be built directly into system design.
This is where principles like Zero Trust become practical: do not automatically trust submitted information simply because it entered the platform successfully.
Today, there are APIs and verification services developers can explore for implementing stronger controls – Examples include: BVN verification, Account name validation, Phone verification, Identity checks, Anomaly detection, Risk scoring etc.
Your system can be designed to automatically flag suspicious records and route high-risk cases for human review – and when human review is required, don’t be tempted to outsource it to an AI assistant.
As someone who has worked across software development, QA, IT audit, application security, and secure engineering, I always say that security today goes beyond penetration testing or vulnerability scanning. It is much about governance – designing systems where controls are part of the business logic, because when governance becomes weak, security incidents stop being only technical problems. They become business risks and trust problems.
