A ride-hailing platform may look simple from the passenger's perspective, from opening the app, requesting a ride, meeting a driver, and reaching their destination.
Behind that experience, however, is a much more complicated system. The platform must verify drivers, build trust between strangers, process financial activity, and help drivers run a business that depends on fuel, maintenance, and reliable income.
As mobility platforms develop, these financial and identity needs are becoming increasingly connected to the core product. That is where embedded finance comes in. Nigeria's embedded finance market alone is projected to grow from roughly $4.34 billion in 2025 to $5.55 billion by 2030, and mobility is expected to be one of the sectors driving that growth.
Zeeh Africa's work with inDrive shows how identity verification, open banking, and financial services can become part of the infrastructure supporting a mobility platform.
Trust starts before the ride
For a passenger, trust in a ride does not begin when the vehicle arrives. It begins with confidence that the person behind the wheel has been properly identified and verified.
For the platform, that means KYC needs to work at scale without creating unnecessary friction for legitimate drivers trying to join or continue using the service. The scale is significant: an estimated 10,000 drivers are active daily in Lagos alone, spread across 26 states and the FCT, making identity verification less a one-time check and more an ongoing infrastructure challenge.
Zeeh's open banking infrastructure ties directly into inDrive's KYC process, positioning Zeeh less as a vendor and more as a partner in the platform's broader digital financial inclusion efforts, helping with driver identity and financial verification along the way.
This illustrates an important shift in how KYC is being viewed. It is easy to treat verification as a compliance requirement that happens somewhere in the background. For a mobility platform, however, identity is directly connected to the customer experience.
A platform needs to know who is providing the service because passengers need to trust who they are getting into a car with. Drivers also need an onboarding process efficient enough to get to work without unnecessary delays.
Identity infrastructure therefore becomes part of marketplace infrastructure.
Where open banking fits
Open banking adds another dimension by making financial information more accessible, provided customers give the appropriate consent.
For platforms, this can create opportunities to build more informed financial processes around their users. The value isn't simply having access to more financial data. It is being able to use relevant information within a specific customer journey.
This matters against a backdrop where, as of 2023, 26 percent of Nigerian adults, about 28.8 million people, remain financially excluded, according to EFInA's Access to Finance survey. Embedding verified identity and financial services into platforms people already use is part of how that gap starts to close.
In mobility, that could mean supporting processes around drivers who already use the platform to earn income. This distinction matters because embedded finance is not about turning every platform into a bank.
It is about identifying financial needs that already exist within a customer relationship and building useful financial services around them.
The driver is also a business
A ride-hailing driver is more than a user of a mobility app. For many drivers, the vehicle is an income-generating asset, and the platform is part of their livelihood. That creates a different set of financial needs.
There are fuel costs, repairs, maintenance, vehicle upgrades, financing requirements, and cash-flow pressures between income periods. In Nigeria, reported platform commissions run around 25 percent per trip, which puts real weight on how much of a driver's earnings are left to cover those costs. Through that lens, embedded finance makes more sense.
The focus shifts from which financial product a platform can add to which financial problems its users are already experiencing. That shift can lead to more relevant services because they connect to real economic activity.
One example is the referral bonus solution Zeeh powers for platforms, a tool that helps drivers earn additional income for bringing new drivers or riders onto the platform, paid out through the same financial infrastructure that handles their verification.
It's a small example of what embedded finance can look like in practice: not a new product bolted onto the platform, but a financial layer built around activity that was already happening.
The CNG conversation
Fuel is one of the clearest examples. For drivers, the cost of keeping a vehicle on the road directly affects how much they can earn. This makes the transition to Compressed Natural Gas, or CNG, both an environmental and an economic issue. CNG is currently positioned as 40 to 60 percent cheaper per kilometre than petrol in Nigeria, a gap wide enough to change the economics of driving for hire.
Nigeria's push toward CNG has sparked growing interest in converting vehicles from petrol to a potentially lower-cost, lower-emission fuel option. However, conversion has an upfront cost, creating a financing problem, one that embedded finance is well placed to help solve.
Zeeh is already working with other partners across the mobility space on financial infrastructure for CNG conversion, and we see this as a direction the wider industry, inDrive included, is likely to move toward. That connects three things often discussed separately: driver economics, financial access, and sustainability.
If financing makes the transition easier, the benefit isn't limited to the vehicle itself. Lower operating costs can affect a driver's business, while wider adoption can contribute to a cleaner transport system.
What this means for mobility platforms
Mobility platforms are increasingly sitting at the intersection of several systems. They are marketplaces connecting drivers and passengers, digital payment environments, sources of income for drivers, and responsible for building enough trust for strangers to transact with one another.
Nigeria's urban mobility and ride-hailing market itself is projected to grow from about $450 million in 2025 to $879 million by 2031, with annual app-booked trips rising from roughly 134 million to 229 million over the same period, growth that will depend as much on trust and driver economics as on ride volume alone.
That makes identity and financial infrastructure increasingly important. The strongest embedded finance opportunities will likely come from understanding these relationships, not from adding financial products simply because the technology makes them possible.
A driver who needs vehicle financing has different needs than a passenger looking for a payment option. Therefore, a platform that understands the difference can build services around genuine demand.
The next layer of mobility
The evolution of mobility is therefore about more than faster matching or better routes. It is about what happens around the ride. Considerations like who the driver is, whether they are verified, how they earn, operating costs, and the financial services that could make work easier matter.
Furthermore, platforms also need to consider how to support safer and more sustainable transportation at the same time. Zeeh's work with inDrive sits within this broader shift, bringing identity verification, open banking and embedded finance closer to the mobility experience.
The ride remains the product customers see. But underneath it is an increasingly sophisticated financial and identity infrastructure that determines how safely, efficiently, and sustainably the platform can operate.
Talk to our team to explore how Zeeh can help your platform build identity, open banking and financial infrastructure into the products your customers already use.
