Sotru targets supplier payment fraud

Sotru, a new South African verification and secure communication platform, aims to tackle impersonation and payment fraud that occurs after a supplier has been verified. The company says traditional know your customer and know your business checks were never designed to address this type of fraud.

“Business email compromise hit 63% of organisations globally in 2024, with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recording $2.77-billion in BEC losses,” says Sotru. “Locally, the Standard Bank data breach in April 2026 and recurring NHLS ransomware incidents have shown how exposed business identity and operational data have become, essentially weaponising this stolen data to feed sophisticated phishing, impersonation, and payment-redirection scams.”

Fraser Edwards, Cheqd co-founder and CEO, says: “Sotru solves a genuine problem which affects us and every company worldwide: invoice manipulation fraud. Sotru’s solution ensures that every company and individual on the platform is verified.”

Sotru won the 2025 Irish Tech Challenge South Africa, run by the Irish Embassy, Dogpatch Labs and the Department of Science and Innovation. The platform emerged from beta testing with more than 40 active beta users.

Moving from static compliance to real-time transaction protection

According to Sotru, most organisations already verify suppliers, clients, and counterparties during onboarding. This, says the company, is rarely where the problem lies; the critical exposure point is that verification ends there, while fraud occurs later inside routine communication channels such as email, messaging platforms, and payment workflows.

The platform aims to address that weakness by issuing businesses with reusable, cryptographically signed digital credentials validated against trusted company, identity, and banking sources. The architecture is designed for high-value, high-volume environments where transaction security is critical. Sotru has deployed infrastructure across sectors with document and payment workflows, including property and conveyancing, construction logistics, corporate procurement, and legal services.

Max Coleman, Sotru co-founder, says: “Compliance is important, but it is not the end state. What businesses ultimately need is confidence that the supplier they originally verified is the same supplier issuing the invoice today, and that the bank account being paid is the one that was validated. That is the difference between a static record and a genuinely trusted business interaction.”

Expanding the defence network: Enterprise protection for all

Sotru says South Africa’s broader fraud climate has made the timing urgent. According to SABRIC’s latest annual data, digital banking fraud remains the dominant banking-crime channel, while AI-enabled tactics continue to heighten impersonation risks. Fraudsters increasingly use AI-generated phishing, WhatsApp manipulation, and voice-cloned deepfakes to hijack business relationships.

To combat this systemic threat, Sotru is widening the ecosystem to ensure protection isn’t gated behind heavy enterprise infrastructure.

Jack Scott-King, Sotru co-founder, says: “The biggest fraud risk today is when verified identity disappears from the communication channel where transactions are being finalised. Building on the validation of our early beta customers, we want to strengthen the local ecosystem. The platform is now available to protect the masses within South Africa.”

Sotru announced free accounts for South African businesses during a limited launch period.

Rebrand, roadmap, and AI-defensive infrastructure

The company’s recent rebrand from Vera to Sotru aims to reflect a broader transition from a point-solution verification tool to a holistic infrastructure for trusted business communication.

Sotru says the aggressive 2026 product roadmap focuses heavily on neutralising next-generation AI threats, including:

• Live Call Identity Verification: Real-time identity authentication during voice and video calls, allowing participants to cryptographically verify the counterparty they’re speaking to and neutralise deepfake and voice-cloning impersonation attempts.
• Active Credential Monitoring: Real-time alerts to notify connected counterparties when banking details, authorised representatives, or company statuses change, helping prevent the silent alterations that often precede payment fraud and supplier impersonation.
• Automated Risk and Compliance Layer: Planned for rollout by the end of Q3 2026, the platform’s automated risk scoring and adverse media screening capabilities are being designed to support South African businesses to meet evolving FICA compliance requirements.

James Clark, Sotru co-founder, says: “The future of business communication cannot treat identity and payment legitimacy as assumptions. As fraud rapidly shifts from email into messaging, voice, and video workflows, organisations need more than a repository for onboarding documents. We are building the infrastructure that makes every high-value interaction identity-aware, encrypted, and continuously trusted from end to end.”

* Visit the Sotru website here.