Manila, Philippines – MarCoPay has partnered with identity verification and compliance provider Sumsub to strengthen fraud prevention, customer onboarding and transaction monitoring for its digital financial services serving Filipino seafarers and their families.
The partnership aims to support MarCoPay’s compliance with the Philippines’ Anti-Financial Account Scamming Act (AFASA), which introduced enhanced requirements for fraud management. The integration combines identity verification, anti-money laundering (AML) screening and transaction monitoring to provide a consolidated view of potential fraud risks throughout the customer lifecycle.
MarCoPay operates an electronic payments platform that enables seafarers to manage, access and transfer funds. The partnership is intended to strengthen security controls as the company serves a workforce whose employment regularly takes them across international borders.
“This partnership strengthens our ability to deliver safe and secure services,” said Hayato Kiyohara, CEO of MarCoPay.
“With enhanced security, we aim to better serve Filipino seafarers and our business partners,” Kiyohara continued.
Sumsub’s services include document-based identity verification, liveness detection and AML screening. Its platform can verify more than 14,000 types of identity documents from over 220 countries and territories, supporting customers with international identity verification requirements.
Its liveness detection technology is designed to authenticate users and identify potential spoofing attempts and deepfakes. The system creates a 3D FaceMap to help confirm a user’s physical presence during verification and references it for subsequent actions, including logins and transactions.
For compliance screening, MarCoPay uses Sumsub to check sanctions lists, politically exposed persons (PEPs), watchlists and adverse media through a single workflow. The service draws on more than 50,000 data sources across over 240 countries and territories.
The partnership also incorporates Sumsub’s AFASA Fraud Management Bundle, which supports transaction monitoring through rule-based fraud detection and dynamic risk scoring. These capabilities are designed to help MarCoPay identify suspicious transactions and respond promptly, including through fund-recovery processes.
The collaboration comes amid growing concerns over AI-enabled fraud. Sumsub reported that deepfake attacks in the Philippines increased by 61% year on year in 2025, while coordinated, multi-step fraud rose by 180% globally over the same period.
“AFASA is reshaping how financial institutions in the Philippines approach fraud prevention, placing greater focus on connected controls across the customer lifecycle. This makes an operational layer that unifies verification, fraud prevention, transaction monitoring, and risk workflows increasingly critical,” said Penny Chai, Vice President, APAC at Sumsub.
“Our partnership with MarCoPay reflects Sumsub’s commitment to supporting Philippine businesses as the compliance landscape evolves. By providing that trust infrastructure needed to build multi-layered defences against AI-enabled fraud, we help businesses build a more resilient response to emerging fraud risks,” Chai continued.
