No enterprise set out to build a patchwork. Each one built responses, with the best tools available at the time.

Compliance needed a know-your-customer tool. Fraud needed a fraud tool. Onboarding needed a digital journey. Each problem had its own vendor, and the point-solution era did exactly what it was meant to do: it digitised an industry that had to move at Covid speed. The vendors selling those tools couldn’t have offered anything else back then. The integrated category didn’t exist yet.

Integrated identity platforms emerged because the patchwork worked, until scale exposed its limits. This isn’t a story about anyone making the wrong call. It’s a story about a market that has matured around decisions made when those were the only ones available.

“Point solutions weren’t designed to fail. They were designed to solve one thing well, long before anyone needed them to talk to each other.”

The numbers most leadership teams will find staggering

Research firm Liminal found that 48% of enterprises use four or more vendors in onboarding, and that those running an integrated identity platform see an 83% reduction in abandonment rates — which tells you what the patchwork was silently costing before. Some 67% of enterprises said they wanted to switch to an integrated platform within five years. Liminal published that research in 2023, so three of those five years are already behind us.

The visible cost is friction. The hidden cost is blindness. When your fraud engine, onboarding flow and authentication layer don’t share signals, you have decisions being made with half the picture.

That’s what a patchwork actually costs.

In Africa, the seams show faster

Popia, sharper know-your-customer regulation and closer scrutiny from the Southern African Fraud Prevention Service (SAFPS) have all raised the compliance bar in this market, while customer patience has shortened. And every new geography means rebuilding identity logic from scratch when it lives across seven different systems.

The threat side is getting louder too. Impersonation listings at the SAFPS rose 38% in 2024, according to the organisation’s annual report presented at its summit in May 2025. That isn’t a vendor problem. It is the system being tested at a pressure no point-solution architecture was designed to absorb.

We see this everywhere we work — operators, automotive, financial services, you name it. Different industries, same patchwork: identity logic spread across half a dozen vendors, each solving a slice, none seeing the whole.

Strategy isn’t the problem. Implementing it is

Most enterprises already have an identity strategy on paper. The challenge isn’t deciding what good looks like. It’s executing it across every channel, every regulatory checkbox, every market.

And that execution is only getting harder. Customers expect frictionless. Regulators expect rigour. Boards expect both, at speed. Holding all of that together on a patchwork worked at smaller scale. At enterprise volume, across multiple markets, with shifting compliance baselines and rising fraud sophistication, it quietly becomes the thing limiting how fast the business can move.

An integrated identity platform isn’t the strategy. It’s how the strategy gets delivered across the journey.

Liminal Strategy Partners, the independent firm tracking this market globally, has named Contactable the regional leader for the Middle East and Africa in its Liminal Index for account opening in financial services. Its 2023 research also put the return from leading integrated identity platforms at 15.3 times, through fewer abandonments, lower fraud and faster decisioning.

Most enterprises don’t lack an identity strategy on paper. They lack a way to execute one across the journey, at speed, without the seams showing.

The one question worth asking your CIO this week

“If our regulator audited us tomorrow, could we produce a single audit trail across identity, compliance and fraud, or would we be stitching it together from four dashboards?”

The answer tells you whether you can actually execute your strategy, or only describe it.

The author, Shaun Strydom, is CEO of Contactable, an integrated identity platform that unifies identity, compliance and workflow across the customer journey through a single integration. Connect with the company on LinkedIn or Facebook
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