By Maxim Kuzin, Head of Fraud Monitoring Department, BPC
From Africa’s digital payments story being one of the fastest-moving structural shifts in global finance — more accounts, more wallets, more rails, more real-time transfers, and more e-commerce — the same connectivity that compresses time-to-transaction also compresses time-to-fraud. Fraud is not merely “leakage”; it is a direct, real threat to financial inclusion, customers’ trust in digital financial services, and bank brands.
The pattern is consistent across markets: as volumes scale, more fraudsters emerge. They exploit behavioural vulnerabilities through social engineering, operational gaps due to flaws in infrastructure and use the speed of instant payments to their own advantage. Interpol’s Africa-focused assessments describe cyber-enabled fraud and scams as “escalating”, with phishing, business email compromise and scam ecosystems expanding alongside digitisation. That raises an uncomfortable question for traditional banks entering 2026 – are we still treating fraud as a channel problem, when it is now an enterprise risk?
What we see across different parts of Africa
Nigeria’s fraud economics have become a macro conversation, not a local news. The Central Bank of Nigeria’s Financial Stability Report explicitly frames rising fraud as a driver of operational risk and points to stronger KYC/CDD controls as a response. Separately, reporting on NIBSS-referenced figures indicates fraud losses of ₦52.26bn in 2024, underscoring how quickly the fraud expands as financial services digitalise in the country.
Another example is South Africa, which offers one of the continent’s clearest data points on how the battle against fraud has shifted from pure technology to psychology. SABRIC’s Annual Crime Statistics describe banking apps as the dominant fraud channel (65.3% of reported incidents), with incidents nearly doubling to around 64,000 and losses from app fraud exceeding R1.2bn with criminals exploiting human error via social engineering rather than “breaking” bank platforms.
Tanzania’s payments infrastructure is increasingly interoperable and instant, which is strategically positive yet operationally demanding. Bank of Tanzania publications on the national payment system point to stronger alignment with international standards (including PCI-DSS, ISO 20022, and cybersecurity principles for payment/settlement systems) and the development of risk management guidelines for significant non-bank payment providers. The same ecosystem progress with high transaction velocity, more participants, more endpoints requires fraud prevention that works in real time, not after the fact.
Kenya’s Financial Sector Stability Report links rapid fintech adoption to increased incidences of fraud, data privacy concerns, cyber-attacks, and cybersecurity alters, and highlights policy actions including tighter oversight of digital credit providers, licensing and regulation of previously unregulated lenders. The subtext is important: fraud is being treated not only as consumer harm, but as a systemic stability and governance issue.
What is being done today from regulation, enforcement to industry coordination
Across Africa, regulators are converging on a few common levers:
- (a) Stronger identity and onboarding controls
- (b) Cyber-resilience requirements for payment system participants
- (c) Bringing fast-growing digital segments under supervisory “line of sight”
- (d) Cross-border crackdowns on scam networks
- (e) Funding and national urgency
For instance, in Nigeria, the CBN’s describes enforcement of stronger KYC/CDD/AML measures, including mandatory BVN/NIN linkage for Tier 1 accounts and restrictions on opening accounts without BVN/NIN explicitly framed as fraud-mitigation controls. In addition Nigeria’s recent announcement of a cybersecurity levy on electronic transfers shows that cyber/fraud risk is being treated as a national security and economic resilience priority, not only a bank operations issue.
South Africa’s Reserve Bank has issued a directive on cybersecurity and cyber-resilience within the national payment system, signalling that payment institutions and system operators are expected to meet formal resilience and cyber control standards. While Kenya’s stability reporting highlights regulation and licensing momentum for digital credit providers as a policy response to technology-driven risks, including fraud and cyber threats.
The practical implication for banks follows. Regulators expect evidence of real-time monitoring, automated alerts, audit-ready reporting, and demonstrable results.
What is next? From channel controls to enterprise fraud management
Africa’s fraud problem is familiar in structure: social engineering, account takeover, synthetic identity, merchant abuse, and fast-transfer scams. South Africa’s data makes the point sharply, criminals scale by exploiting humans, not only systems. Fraud follows the payments and the payments are now instant.
A bank-ready response in 2026 should be organised as an operating model:
- Step 1: Treat fraud as an enterprise risk at scale. Create unified governance across cards, digital banking, instant payments, merchant acquiring, and e-commerce. Fragmented ownership is where fraud hides.
- Step 2: Build real-time detection with post-incident learning curves. Instant rails require decisioning in milliseconds and investigation in minutes. Banks need AI/ML-powered continuous monitoring, strong alert quality management, and feedback to improve models.
- Step 3: Make identity and behaviour main signals. Because social engineering is the growth engine, banks must elevate behavioural analytics: device intelligence, velocity patterns, beneficiary risk, session anomalies, and link analysis across accounts, devices, merchants, and payees.
- Step 4: Operationalise fraud work. Case management, playbooks, and only measurable outcomes. Fraud platforms are only as effective as the workflows around them: testing, escalation, customer contact, merchant collaboration, recovery, regulatory reporting.
- Step 5: Engineer for regulatory reporting and data residency realities. African institutions face heterogeneous data residency expectations, outsourcing constraints, and supervisory reporting formats. Platforms must support deployments that match local rules without sacrificing analytic capability.
Where BPC SmartVista Fraud Management fits: enterprise, omnichannel, configurable, deployable
Advanced platforms such as BPC’s SmartVista Enterprise Fraud Management is designed to support the shift from siloed channel-by-channel prevention to enterprise fraud management covering simultaneously all layers and channels. The omnichannel solution applies AI and machine learning techniques to instantly adapt based on vast learning data and link analysis to identify anomalies across channels from card payments, mobile banking, instant payments, core banking, merchant activity to e-commerce. Its low-code/no-code configuration supports rapid rule adjustments, back-testing against historical data, and integration with additional checks of biometrics or identity when regulatory requirements demand it.
In Africa, the deployment model is not a technical preference; it is a governance and economics decision. Banks must balance data-residency expectations, supervisory auditability, latency, skills availability, and the reality of constrained budgets and often all at once. That is why SmartVista Enterprise Fraud Management can be implemented either on-premise or in the cloud which is increasingly practical. This lets institutions meet local hosting and reporting requirements while still operating with the speed that real-time fraud prevention demands. Recent implementations illustrate it.
In Mauritania, BIMBANK moved toward modern fraud prevention as the Central Bank tightened expectations around real-time monitoring, automated alerting, and channel-level reporting, seeking to replace an ageing system and scale alongside rising transaction volumes while preserving trust. In Nigeria, First Bank of Nigeria strengthened fraud prevention with SmartVista on enterprise-wide level, across channels, in response to a national surge in digital fraud risk, protecting revenue, reputation, customer loyalty, and transaction integrity as the market continues to digitalise.
Yet fraud is not an “Africa-only” crisis; it is a global. Banks that have reduced exposure most effectively tend to follow the same playbook: unify controls across channels, move from manual review to real-time monitoring, and modernise defences so detection keeps pace with faster payments and more sophisticated social engineering. Examples from other regions reinforce the point. In Malaysia, Co-opbank Pertama adopted a cloud approach to transition from manual reviews toward real-time AI-powered fraud monitoring. In Pakistan, institutions such as Meezan Bank and Samba Bank strengthened protection across digital payment channels. In Europe, Bulgaria’s DSK Bank centralised fraud prevention under a single unified platform and reported material savings through improved control and consistency across all its channels.
The common architecture lesson across markets is the following – modern AI-powered fraud prevention, cross-channel visibility, rapid configuration.
Time to act
The current concerns are clear – fraud is rising with digitisation and volume of operations; social engineering starts to outperform purely technical attacks, instant payments compress response time, regulators are escalating expectations for real-time monitoring and audit-ready reporting. African traditional banks need to act now. Move from fragmented, channel-level fraud prevention models to a unified, real-time, enterprise fraud management operating models, measured by loss avoidance, recovery, and trust.
