Trade transaction verification for East African corridor finance.
We verify whether the shipment behind a trade finance request actually crossed the border.
Structured lender verification reports delivered within 24 hours.
The information gap behind SME trade finance rejection
Across East Africa, lenders financing SME trade transactions operate with fragmented or unverifiable documentation. The issue is not simply lack of capital. It is inability to independently confirm whether the underlying shipment, documentation, and transaction history are real and internally consistent.
KEPHIS sees the certificate. KRA sees the export declaration. URA sees the import record. The lender sees none of them directly. Jabali assembles all three into a single verified signal — before the lending decision.
Verification infrastructure built for East African trade corridors
The system combines institutional cross-referencing, structured document analysis, and fraud detection heuristics to produce a reproducible verification output for lenders. Jabali amplifies existing government digitisation infrastructure — it does not duplicate it.
The bilateral KRA–URA customs confirmation is the only verification signal in EAC trade finance that cannot be fabricated by a single actor on either side of the border. Two independent sovereign customs authorities must independently record the same shipment. No document forger, no corrupt clearing agent, no post-hoc fabrication can produce this signal alone.
| Institution | Verification role |
|---|---|
| KEPHIS | Phytosanitary certificate confirmation — IEICS / ePhyto system |
| Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) | Export declaration validation — EX-3, HS code, declared value |
| Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) | Import-side customs confirmation — ASYCUDA bilateral |
| ePhyto certification workflow | Certificate traceability and reuse detection |
| RECTS corridor framework | Transit time and corridor structure reference |
Jabali cross-references submitted documents against institutional records where available. The system is designed around existing corridor documentation workflows and customs processes. Formal data access agreements are in progress.
21 corridor-specific fraud heuristics are applied across all five layers. Tier 1 risks — certificate reuse, double financing, ghost exporters — trigger automatic escalation and score caps regardless of layer score.
The verification pipeline was built around actual corridor trade documentation used in East African agricultural exports.
Built from direct exposure to how trust operates across East African trade corridors.
Trade across East African corridors has always depended on personal reputation more than institutional verification. Traders spend years building trusted networks within local communities — yet remain effectively invisible to lenders, insurers, and larger buyers, because no reliable mechanism exists to independently verify their transactions.
As trade volumes grow and supply chains become more complex, that trust gap becomes increasingly costly. Legitimate traders cannot access finance. Buyers face verification risk. Lenders make conservative decisions or no decision at all — not because the underlying trade is fraudulent, but because the underlying trade is unverifiable.
Compliance is not simply a regulatory obligation. It is trust infrastructure. Well-designed verification systems reduce uncertainty, expand access to finance, and create confidence between parties that do not already know each other. That is what KEPHIS, KRA, and URA are already doing in their respective domains. The gap is not the absence of data. It is the absence of a mechanism that connects that data into a signal a lender can act on.
Jabali was built to fill that specific gap — not to replace existing customs, SPS, financial, or regulatory systems, but to help those systems work together more effectively by creating a shared layer of transaction verification that all participants can understand and trust.
Two outputs. One report. Within 24 hours.
Jabali does not make lending decisions. The system provides structured transaction verification outputs used by lenders as one input into credit assessment.
A first-time borrower with no credit history but a TTS of 87 is financeable. Jabali unlocks traders who have been exporting for years but have never accessed formal credit.
0–100 composite verification score
Derived from four independent institutional layers. Deterministic, source-attributed, and reproducible. Lower scores identify exactly which layer is unconfirmed and why.
Longitudinal transaction reliability profile
Built from accumulated verified transaction history. Certificate integrity, document accuracy rate, declared value consistency, and repayment history as it develops. Scores run 300–850.
One structured PDF delivered by email within 24 hours. No system integration required. No workflow change. The report is the product.
Request sample lender report →Three steps
Via WhatsApp (*JAB#) or USSD
The exporter photographs and submits the document set via WhatsApp, with USSD fallback for traders without smartphones. No app download required.
Automated cross-referencing
Automated cross-referencing against KEPHIS, KRA, and URA records. Human review for ambiguous cases. 21 corridor-specific fraud heuristics applied to every submission.
One structured PDF
TTS score, GridScore, risk flags, component breakdown, conditional recommendation, complete audit trail. Delivered within 24 hours of submission.
You use Jabali alongside your existing tools. Not instead of them.
The credit bureau tells you about the borrower. KYC tells you about the person. Jabali tells you about the deal. All three answer different questions. All three are necessary.
| What it tells you | Credit bureauTransUnion / Metropol | KYC toolIdentity verification | JabaliTransaction intelligence |
|---|---|---|---|
| About the borrower | Repayment history on past loans | Not covered | Not covered — use bureau |
| About the person | Not covered | Identity, sanctions, PEP screening | Not covered — use KYC |
| About the transaction | Cannot confirm shipment is real | Cannot confirm transaction occurred | Whether this specific shipment occurred — verified across KEPHIS, KRA, and URA |
| Unbanked traders | Nothing — no prior loan history | Identity only, no trade signal | Trade history replaces credit history — TTS 87 is financeable regardless of prior loans |
| Bilateral customs signal | Not available | Not available | KRA ↔ URA confirmation — the only signal neither side of the border can fabricate alone |
| Report format | Credit score + history PDF | Identity verification report | TTS score + GridScore + source breakdown — one PDF, within 24 hours, by email |
Phase 1 — Nairobi–Kampala maize corridor
Jabali's pilot focuses on maize exports via Malaba and Busia OSBP, serving SME exporters with working capital requirements of $2,000–$10,000 per transaction. Maize was selected for Phase 1 because of its standardised document requirements, high corridor volume, repeat trader profiles, and established phytosanitary certification workflow through KEPHIS.
The corridor operates on a 2.9-day transit time under RECTS, making verification turnaround within 24 hours commercially viable.
| Phase roadmap | |
|---|---|
| Phase 1 | Nairobi–Kampala · Maize |
| Phase 2 | Adjacent grain corridors · EAC expansion |
| Phase 3 | COMESA corridors · Regional scale |
Three worlds. One gap that needed filling.
Samatar Ahmed comes from a family involved in cross-border trade across Somalia, Kenya, and regional markets — livestock, FMCG, agricultural goods — across generations. That gave him early and direct exposure to how corridor commerce actually works: the documentation, the informal settlement arrangements, the customs realities, and the persistent difficulty legitimate traders face accessing formal finance. He later worked across compliance and fintech systems — KYC, fraud detection, transaction reconciliation, document verification — and then spent seven years building large-scale public-sector digital infrastructure in the UK, where the operational demands of auditability, interoperability, and institutional trust became a second nature.
The combination of those three worlds — corridor trade from the inside, compliance systems from the ground up, and institutional infrastructure at scale — is what Jabali is built from. He built the verification system himself: the scoring engine, OCR pipeline, WhatsApp submission interface, fraud detection stack, and lender report format. He is a Domestic Trade Advisor to Somalia's Ministry of Commerce and Industry, a native Somali speaker, and is based in Nairobi.
Working with lenders on the Nairobi–Kampala corridor. Get in touch.
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Trade transaction verification infrastructure for East African corridor finance.
Send us one real transaction. We deliver the report within 24 hours — at no cost. That report is the conversation.
We also welcome conversations with investors focused on trade infrastructure and financial inclusion across East Africa. Get in touch.