KYC verification

Under Ghana's Securities Industry Act, 2016 and the SEC Ghana Crowdfunding Guidelines 2024, every investor must complete Know-Your-Customer (KYC) verification before subscribing to any campaign. Ardent's KYC is fully digital: you photograph an accepted ID, submit a short live selfie, and our identity provider runs the document, face match, and sanctions checks in the background. Most Ghanaian applicants are approved in under 24 hours; the hard cap is 48 hours on business days.

Regulated by SEC Ghana

What KYC unlocks

Until KYC is approved you can browse, save campaigns to a watchlist, and read offer documents, but you cannot subscribe, fund your wallet, or participate in investor votes. The moment KYC clears, all three unlock at once and any pending subscription drafts you started become submittable.

Documents we accept

We support three government-issued IDs, in the following order of preference:

1. Ghana Card: the National Identification Authority (NIA) card. Preferred because it machine-reads cleanly, carries a chip, and verifies against NIA's backing register.
2. International passport: any valid Ghanaian or foreign passport. We read the full machine-readable zone (MRZ) and check it against the photo page.
3. Voter ID card: accepted as a fallback for Ghanaian residents who do not yet hold a Ghana Card. Expect slightly longer manual review because there is no machine-readable zone.

Whatever you choose, the document must be current (not expired), undamaged, and in your own name exactly as you signed up; mismatched names are the single most common cause of rejection.

How to photograph your ID correctly

Getting this right on the first try cuts your approval time dramatically. Use the guidance below; we enforce most of it in-app but it's easier to do well first time than to redo it.

1. 1

   Find flat, even light

   Lighting

   Outdoor daylight in shade works best. Indoors, face a window or use a ceiling light. Avoid overhead direct sunlight, which creates hard shadows, and avoid backlighting, which turns your ID into a silhouette.

2. 2

   Place the ID on a dark, non-reflective surface

   Surface

   A plain wooden desk or a dark cloth gives the best contrast for our scanner. Avoid glass, glossy laminate, and polished tabletops; they create reflections that obscure the card's holograms.

3. 3

   Shoot straight down, not at an angle

   Angle

   Hold the phone directly above the card so the edges stay parallel to the photo frame. Angled shots distort the text and can trigger a fake-document warning. A slight adjustment here is usually the fix for a 'could not read document' error.

4. 4

   Fill the frame, all four corners visible

   Framing

   The ID should fill most of the frame, but every corner must be clearly inside the photo with a small margin around it. If any corner is cropped or covered, the submission will fail validation.

5. 5

   Check the preview before submitting

   Preview

   Our app shows a preview with an auto-generated quality score. Tap to zoom and confirm all text is sharp, the photo is in focus, and there are no reflections across your face on the ID. Retake if anything is doubtful.

The liveness check

After the ID photo, you will be asked to record a short live selfie. This is not the same as a still photo, the camera guides you through a handful of random movements (turn head, blink, smile) so our identity provider can confirm that the person holding the document is a live human, not a photo of one.

What happens behind the scenes

Once you submit, several checks run in parallel:

• Document authenticity: machine-reading the chip or MRZ, verifying holograms and fonts, matching the photo page.
• Liveness and face match: confirming the selfie matches the ID photo and is not a deepfake or replay.
• Sanctions and PEP screening: checking you against UN, UK, US, ECOWAS, and Ghanaian sanctions lists, plus politically-exposed-person databases.
• Register match: for Ghana Cards, confirming the card is active in NIA's backing register.

If every check passes automatically you will usually have an approval email inside a few minutes. If any check needs a human review, a compliance officer picks it up during Ghanaian business hours; that is what takes us into the 24–48 hour window.

What to do if you are rejected

Most rejections are fixable in a single retry once you know the cause. You will receive an email and an in-app notification with a plain-English reason and a direct link back into the KYC flow. Common fixes are:

• Document quality too low. Retake the photo using the guidance above. Re-submitting is free and immediate.
• Name mismatch. Update your name in Settings → Profile to match the ID exactly, then re-submit.
• Expired ID. Renew through NIA, Immigration, or the EC and submit the new one.
• Sanctions match. We are legally required to decline a match, but false positives happen. Reply to the rejection email with any supporting evidence and a compliance officer will review within two business days.

If after one or two retries you are still blocked, write to us via the in-app support channel, a human will always review a genuine complaint.

After you are approved

Once approved, you can fund your wallet, subscribe to live campaigns, vote at AGMs, and use the secondary market when it is live. Your next stop is Investor categories to confirm which tier applies to you; that determines the per-campaign and per-year limits on your subscriptions.