How a regulated fintech company replaced ad hoc reference calls with structured, multi-country background screening and avoided four potentially costly hiring mistakes.
Industry:
Fintech / Digital Lending
Team Size:
160 employees across 4 countries
Headquarters:
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Hiring Markets
KSA, UAE, Egypt, Pakistan
Remire Products:
Background Checks, Pre-screening, Identity Verification, Criminal Records, Education & Employment Verification
It is a digital lending platform licensed by the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA). The company provides micro-lending and buy-now-pay-later products to consumers and small businesses across Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with technology and operations teams based in Egypt and Pakistan.
As a regulated financial institution, it operates under strict compliance requirements. Every employee with access to customer financial data, credit decisioning systems, or payment infrastructure must pass a thorough pre-employment screening. It’s not optional, SAMA regulations require it, and client trust depends on it.
By early 2025, it had 160 employees and was hiring aggressively to support product expansion. The company planned to onboard 70+ new hires across all four countries within the year. The problem wasn’t finding candidates. It was verifying them.
Their existing screening process had been built informally as the company grew. It worked when they were hiring five people a quarter. At 70+ hires per year across four countries, it was falling apart.
The two falsified degrees were the incident that forced the issue. Both employees had been working in data operations roles with access to customer records.
When the discrepancies surfaced during an internal audit, it had to terminate both employees, conduct a data access review, and report the incident internally. The reputational and operational cost far exceeded what proper screening would have cost upfront.
The compliance team had a clear requirement. The company needed a structured, multi-country background check process to verify identity, education, employment history, and criminal records consistently. They also needed audit-ready documentation for every hire.
Veridian’s head of compliance evaluated two screening providers alongside Remire, an HR solution provider. The decision came down to three factors:,
Remire’s screening process was integrated into Veridian’s hiring workflow within one week. Here’s what each layer of screening covered.
01
Identity & Document Verification
Every candidate’s government-issued ID was verified against national databases in their country of residence. Remire’s background checks platform cross-referenced document numbers, photographs, and expiry dates. For non-citizen hires in the KSA and UAE, work permits and residency status were verified in parallel.
02
Education Verification
Remire verified degrees, diplomas, and professional certifications directly with issuing institutions, not through candidate-provided documents. For international degrees, Remire’s network contacted universities in Pakistan, Egypt, India, the UK, and Canada. This is where the previous process had failed: two falsified degrees had slipped through because HR relied on scanned certificates without independent verification.
03
Employment History Checks
Remire contacted previous employers directly to verify job titles, employment dates, and reasons for departure. For candidates with 3+ roles, the most recent two positions were fully verified. Self-employment claims were cross-referenced against commercial registration records where available.
04
Criminal & Regulatory Screening
Criminal record checks were run through law enforcement and judicial databases in each country. For KSA-based hires, Remire also screened against SAMA’s regulatory watchlists and sanctions databases. Any pending litigation or regulatory actions were flagged for compliance review before an offer was extended.
05
Consolidated Reporting & Ongoing Monitoring
Each candidate received a single screening report with pass/flag/fail status across all check categories. Flagged items included context and recommended next steps. All reports were stored in Remire’s dashboard with full audit trails — exportable in one click for regulatory reviews or internal audits.
Within the first eight months, Remire screened every new hire across all four countries. The results spoke directly to the risks it had been carrying.
4
Candidates flagged with falsified credentials — caught before any offer was signed
3 Days
Average screening turnaround, down from 10
60%
Faster than previous screening process
100%
Of the hires, now have audit-ready screening records
0
Lost candidates due to screening delays since launch
1 click
Compliance report export for SAMA reviews
The four flagged candidates were the headline. Two had fabricated university degrees, one claiming a master’s from a university that had no record of the candidate. One had omitted a termination for cause from a previous employer.
One had a pending fraud case that didn’t appear on standard reference checks but was caught through Remire’s criminal screening layer.
All four would have been onboarded under the old process. In a regulated financial services company, any one of those hires could have triggered a compliance incident, a data breach, or a regulatory penalty.
The cost of Remire’s screening for all four candidates combined was less than what it spent on the internal investigation after the two falsified degrees were discovered the previous year.
Their screening problem wasn’t that they weren’t doing background checks. It was that they were doing them inconsistently, had different standards by country, performed manual verification that missed forgeries, and had no documentation trail when regulators came asking.
Remire replaced that with a structured, multi-country screening process that runs the same checks for every candidate, verifies every claim independently, and produces audit-ready reports automatically. In a regulated industry, that’s not a nice-to-have.
It’s the difference between catching a problem at the offer stage and discovering it during an audit.
“In fintech, one bad hire with access to the wrong system can undo years of trust. We learned that the hard way. Remire’s screening caught four people we would have onboarded — including one with an active fraud case. The turnaround is fast, the reports are thorough, and when SAMA asks for documentation, I pull it up in thirty seconds. That peace of mind is worth more than anything on the invoice.”
Head of Compliance
You can’t afford to skip the check.
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