Shahid Hanif, CEO and Co-Founder of Shufti – Interview Series

Interviews Shahid Hanif, CEO and Co-Founder of Shufti – Interview Series Published July 29, 2026 By Antoine Tardif, CEO & Founder of Unite.AI Add Unite.AI to your preferred sources on Google Shahid Hanif, CEO and Co-Founder of Shufti, is a technology entrepreneur with extensive experience building identity verification, fintech, blockchain, and decentralized software platforms. He co-founded Shufti in 2017 and spent more than seven years as Chief Technology Officer, leading the in-house development of its artificial intelligence-driven biometric and document verification technology before becoming CEO in December 2024. Hanif is also the founder of Developers Studio, a blockchain development company with more than 100 specialists, and previously served as CTO of Quickbit, where he helped develop its cryptocurrency payment technology ahead of the company’s initial public offering. Earlier, he co-founded Programmers Force and helped expand the software and data science company to more than 500 employees across ten offices on three continents.Shufti is an artificial intelligence-powered identity verification platform that helps organizations establish trust, prevent fraud, and meet Know Your Customer, Know Your Business, and Anti-Money Laundering requirements. Its platform brings together document and biometric verification, electronic identity verification, NFC-based checks, business verification, age assurance, fraud detection, ongoing monitoring, and case management through a unified infrastructure. The company supports thousands of document types and more than 150 languages across over 240 countries and territories, allowing businesses to verify customers and organizations through a single global integration. Its technology examines document authenticity, biometric liveness, device intelligence, and other risk signals to detect forged documents, deepfakes, account manipulation, and coordinated identity attacks.When you co-founded Shufti in 2017, you initially led the company’s technology development as Chief Technology Officer before becoming CEO in 2024. What shortcomings in digital identity verification originally motivated you to build the platform, and how has your understanding of the problem changed with the rise of generative AI?When we co-founded Shufti in 2017, the biggest challenges were slow verification, too much manual work, and systems that didn’t work well across different countries. Many identity verification solutions were inconsistent, especially in high-risk industries. They also struggled to verify documents in non-Latin languages and couldn’t reliably verify identities from around the world.Today, generative AI has changed the problem. It’s no longer just about reading an ID document. It’s about knowing whether the document and the person presenting it are real. AI has made identity fraud faster, cheaper, and much easier to scale. We’ve learned that verifying someone once during onboarding is no longer enough. Businesses now need AI that can detect even the most advanced fake documents and identities.Belgian authorities recently warned that more than 10,000 people fell victim to AI-enabled identity fraud over the past year. What does this case reveal about how quickly identity crime is evolving, an