Maya is combining the Philippines’ National ID infrastructure with AI and automation to make digital identity verification faster, while maintaining the safeguards required for financial institutions.
The homegrown fintech has integrated National ID eVerify, the Philippine Statistics Authority’s identity-verification service, into its onboarding process. Since early 2026, eligible customers upgrading their Maya accounts have been able to verify their identities using their National ID number instead of photographing and uploading a physical ID.
The development comes as the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) moves toward wider adoption of National ID authentication services across the financial sector. The central bank has proposed requiring supervised financial institutions to integrate with the system for customer due diligence and identity verification.
“National digital infrastructure gives us a trusted foundation to build on,” said Alfred Lo, Chief Technology Officer at Maya. “By combining the National ID with homegrown AI and automation, we can remove friction for customers while keeping verification robust and scalable.”
National ID simplifies Maya’s verification process
Under Maya’s National ID-first onboarding process, eligible customers can enter their National ID number rather than upload a physical identification document or manually re-enter information already on record.
Maya then verifies the information through National ID eVerify against government-held National ID records, followed by identity verification through a video selfie.
If additional information is required, the process asks customers only for the missing details. Those who cannot be verified through National ID eVerify can still proceed through Maya’s regular ID-upload process without restarting their application.
Despite the simplified process, Maya says its existing safeguards remain in place, including requirements for know-your-customer (KYC), identity verification, screening, and other regulatory checks.
AI handles repetitive verification tasks
AI and automation work behind the scenes to process much of the repetitive work involved in verification.
Maya uses agentic AI—AI systems designed to perform defined workflow steps within established controls—for its National ID-first KYC and KYC deduplication processes.
These systems help validate information, identify potential duplicate accounts, perform required checks, and route exceptions to employees for human review.
The approach was recently showcased at the BSP AI Summit, where Maya was among three companies invited to demonstrate how AI is being deployed in the Philippine financial sector.
“For us, the real test of AI is not how advanced the model sounds. It is whether it solves a real customer problem safely, reliably and at scale,” said Melecio Valerio, Head of Data Governance at Maya, who presented the company’s use case at the summit.
Onboarding turnaround improves by 84%
Maya says the combination of National ID verification and automation has already produced measurable results.
For consumer onboarding, the company reports an 84% improvement in overall turnaround time, reducing the time customers spend waiting for their verification to be completed. The automation also allows Maya employees to spend less time on repetitive processing and more time handling exceptions, investigations, and cases that require human judgment.
This reflects Maya’s broader strategy of incorporating AI into its financial services rather than treating it as a standalone technology project.
The company currently uses machine learning, decision engines, behavioral scoring, anomaly detection, and intelligent automation across areas including onboarding, credit, fraud management, personalization, customer care, and operations.
As National ID infrastructure becomes more widely integrated into the financial system, Maya’s implementation offers an example of how government-backed digital infrastructure can be combined with AI to streamline financial services without removing the human oversight and regulatory controls behind them.
