MarCoPay Partners With Sumsub to Strengthen Fraud Prevention for Filipino Seafarers, Support AFASA Compliance

Sumsub, the first AI-powered trust infrastructure for compliance at scale, is partnering with MarCoPay, a Philippines-based electronic platform for seafarers and their families, to support customer onboarding, ongoing compliance checks, and transaction monitoring in line with the Philippines’ Anti-Financial Account Scamming Act (AFASA) requirements. By providing a connected view of the real-time fraud signals across the customer journey, this enables MarCoPay to strengthen continuous fraud prevention and risk management processes.

MarCoPay enables seafarers to securely manage, access and transfer their funds through a digital ecosystem designed for speed, reliability and convenience. Its approach combines accessible payment services with compliance and fraud prevention controls, reflecting its commitment to financial security and consumer protection.

The Philippines remains the world’s leading supplier of seafarers, reinforcing the need for secure financial services that protect a globally mobile workforce and their families. According to Sumsub’s Identity Fraud Report 2025-26, deepfake attacks in the country increased 61% year-on-year in 2025—one of the highest rates in the Asia-Pacific region—while sophisticated multi-step coordinated fraud rose 180% year-on-year globally, highlighting the growing challenge posed by AI-enabled fraud. AFASA’s enhanced fraud-management requirements, which took effect in June 2026, further raise the bar for real-time monitoring and fund-recovery controls across financial institutions.

“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.”

Serving Filipino seafarers through its electronic payments platform, MarCoPay uses Sumsub’s document-based identity verification, Liveness Detection and AML Screening to support secure customer onboarding. With the ability to verify over 14,000 types of identity documents from more than 220 countries and territories, Sumsub provides the global coverage needed to support seafarers whose work regularly takes them across borders.

Powered by Sumsub’s proprietary Liveness Detection, MarCoPay can authenticate genuine users in seconds while helping detect spoofing attempts and deepfakes. The technology creates a 3D FaceMap to confirm that a user is physically present during verification and continuously references it for authorizing all future actions, such as logins and transactions, strengthening defences against AI-enabled impersonation and fraud.

MarCoPay uses Sumsub’s AML Screening to conduct sanctions, politically exposed person (PEP), watchlist and adverse media checks through a single workflow. The solution draws on more than 50,000 data sources across over 240 countries and territories, supporting MarCoPay’s compliance processes as it scales.

This integrated set of controls supports MarCoPay’s fraud prevention efforts in line with the AFASA requirements. Sumsub’s AFASA Fraud Management Bundle complements these measures by enabling transaction monitoring through rule-based fraud detection and dynamic risk scoring. It helps MarCoPay identify and respond promptly to suspicious transactions, including the fund-recovery processes.

“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.”

To learn more about Sumsub’s AFASA Fraud Management Bundle, please visit: https://sumsub.com/aml-transaction-monitoring/.