30% fewer API calls and six-figure monthly savings, enabling OkHi to scale address verification to millions across underserved communities.
Cutting API Costs, Enriching Google Maps, and Unlocking Financial Access Across Africa
OkHi is an AI-powered address verification service that helps companies serve people living at informal, unreliable, or non-existent addresses.
OkHi links people to places using proprietary AI logic and Google Maps APIs. Its Verify product creates a GPS-based geofence around a user’s home and applies behavioural analysis to confirm residency, enabling financial institutions and others to confidently extend essential services to more people.
30% fewer API calls and six-figure monthly savings, enabling OkHi to scale address verification to millions across underserved communities.
Everyday technology that works well in most of the world might not work that well in places where the usual infrastructure doesn’t exist – think street addresses, or the verifiable documents we take for granted.
For example, most people reliably receive online packages because they have a clear physical address. Equally, for most of us, it is easy to agree a mobile phone contract by verifying address and identity through something as simple as a bank statement.
However, for those with an unreliable address or no bank account, it becomes difficult to get access to these everyday services. The net result: groups such as people in informal settlements, and the unbanked, are unfairly excluded from access to many services.
It’s unfair to the individual and, for the companies, leaves revenue on the table. In this case study, we explain how the combined geolocation, maps, and AI expertise of OkHi, OniGroup, and Google worked in concert to improve access to everyday services across Africa.
Address accuracy works on a sliding scale. In some places, addresses are clear, and visually identifying a building is simple. In others, addresses are inaccurate or unclear or worse, only navigable through GPS coordinates or colloquial descriptions.
OkHi is a company that offers an AI-powered address verification service that helps businesses, particularly financial institutions, to verify a customer's place of residence in cases where the customer’s address lacks clarity.
"For millions in Africa, a clear physical address is unattainable. Our technology links people to places using geofencing and behavioural patterns, creating a digital certificate that is a lifeline to banking and basic services in informal areas." says OkHi’s CEO, Timbo Drayson.
The OkHi service is integrated into a mobile app or website and helps its clients to increase revenue by making the service more broadly available, while reducing the risk of fraud and broken deliveries.
The company is a particularly critical enabler in emerging markets where address use is not as formal as in Europe or North America.
OkHi has two main products. Collect helps users capture digital addresses, starting with a GPS point, followed by a text address, and backed up by a user-verified Google Street View image.
It gives users a way to establish an address where traditional street names and numbers are nonexistent, which then increases address coverage for OkHi’s clients. To make this work, OkHi closely integrates core Google Maps API services:
That’s a lot of API calls, and here, OniGroup played a key role as a Google Partner in Mapping and Mobility.
As OkHi scaled its services, it became clear that monthly Google Maps bills would soon add up – with projections running into six figures a month. Given the relatively price-conscious nature of both the consumers and businesses in the markets OkHi serves, it was critical to reduce the cost of API calls to the absolute minimum.
Negotiating on behalf of OkHi, OniGroup helped the company access additional discounted pricing tiers that slashed the projected API costs to a bare minimum.
OniGroup also stepped through OkHi’s existing code to optimise API calls – thereby reducing the number of API calls made to Google services from an average of ten per lookup, to seven or eight.
"For a company scaling as fast as OkHi, every API call adds up. We helped them architect their solution to cut calls from ten down to seven, ensuring deep savings that ultimately made their service more accessible to the end consumer." – according to Joshua Ojo, Sales Leader, OniGroup.
It resulted in deep savings that OkHi could pass on to its clients, who, in turn, passed the savings on to consumers.
In some countries, like Saudi Arabia, women can be unbanked as men culturally sign household contracts. That makes it very challenging for women to prove where they live. So, for example, women can’t agree to a new mobile phone contract because the network operator can’t perform address verification without an affidavit from her husband.
That’s where OkHi’s Verify service steps in. Verify uses GPS points to create a geofence around a user's home and monitors their time spent inside the geofence to identify behavioural patterns that they live at the address.
This allows OkHi to generate a digital proof of address certificate without relying on utility bills or government databases, making it effective even in informal settlements or where customers have little or no paperwork, and where road identification infrastructure is scarce.
That results in improved accessibility to goods and services even for minorities who were previously excluded from the services we take for granted.
OkHi produces enormous volumes of user-generated data, as millions of users contribute to accurate address data. Useful for OkHi and its clients, but leaving out the tremendous value it can provide to broader society.
That’s where OniGroup stepped in to help OkHi connect directly to the Google Maps database – augmenting existing Google Maps data in instances where Google Maps simply does not work well.
"The most rewarding outcome is enhancing the fundamental Google Maps service. By leveraging OkHi's user-generated content, we're helping to correct errors where traditional geocoding failed, making maps more accurate for everyone in underserved regions.", said Timbo.
For example, in some locations, an API request for a reverse geocode lookup would come up with the wrong street name up to 50% of the time. OniGroup opened the conversations ensuring OkHi keeps Google data more accurate thanks to the company’s user-generated content.
We’re all used to handling everyday technology – a quick flick through Maps if we want to know where something is second nature. But for many of OkHi’s clients, it may well be their first time opening a maps app, so doing something like dropping a Maps pin isn’t intuitive.
One of the tweaks OkHi is making to its service is an open text box for address input. The box requests that the user describe the address using a colloquial description that makes sense to them. OkHi then uses AI combined with several Google Maps API calls to infer a probable structured address.
Again, it helps make sure that everyone can access the products and services they deserve – no matter where they live, or their level of technological skills.
OniGroup helped us to make our service more accessible – empowering the public to access contracts and services, fundamentally levelling the playing field in emerging economies." – according to Timbo.
It’s a powerful example of how technology experts can work together creatively to extend and augment the tools we take for granted, driving giant leaps in inclusivity for the previously underserved.
