More Collaboration Will Foster Digital Financial Services Security

Trust of the financial eco system is central to mass adoption and deepening financial inclusion. Concerns of fraud and loss of customers` funds more so funds for the poor can lead to deep hesitation to use digital financial platforms and tools.

Mobile money has largely been delivered with more traditionally secure telecom channels such as USSD and STK. While these have their know vulnerabilities, their technical exploitation has been less perpetrated but a lot of social engineering through communication and persuasion of unsuspecting customers to share PIN, OTP and send money to fraudsters has been a very regular occurrence in the leading mobile money markets.

The era of interoperability fueled by leading platforms such as Majoloop will potentially increase the scale of possibility to fraud with fraudsters on one network targeting those on another network or bank to transfer funds over the interoperable Majoloop powered switch.

As thus, the industry stakeholders and players including telecoms, banks and regulators that handle KYC, need to collaborate more to share information of sim card centered frauds that fuel mobile social engineering fraud.

HiPipo Foundation Include Everyone program will take extra effort in our research, education and advocacy campaigns to ensure stakeholders appreciate the increased scale of social engineering fraud and collectively collaborate for information sharing.  This will also supplement efforts to combat AML and CFT.

Another dimension of growing risk is increased transactions over new generation digital channels i.e Apps, Web and social banking. Cybercrime that was initially Internet IP centric will hence forth increase as we see channel advances. Similarly, effort from tech and regulatory fronts will have to be boosted to hasten cyber protection of unsuspecting and naive consumers of which majority would likely be the poor, women and youth that a newly banking or semi banking citizens.

Join HiPipo Foundation during the Include Everyone advocacy events series to discuss these issues and provide best practice recommendation to addresses these financial inclusion challenges.

Mojaloop Phase 4 Convening – Johannesburg, South Africa

HiPipo Foundation Include Everyone Team Attend Mojaloop Phase 4 Convening – Johannesburg, South Africa

HiPipo Foundation Include Everyone Team, were privileged to participate in the Mojaloop Phase 4 convening that was held in Johannesburg, South Africa, between 27 to 30 January 2020.

The convening had 115 attendees from 23 countries confirming its stable growth and setting new record.

Among several presentations, HiPipo Foundation Include Everyone team presented results from the #HackMojaloop and Summit that was held in Kampala during Q4 of 2019.

The convening event attendees performed over 142 ATM transactions and 80 POS transactions in a proof of concept demonstration of the software capabilities.

 

This further brings to light Mojaloop readiness for commercial adoption. Plus, with projects such as Mowali and TIPS planned to commercially go live soon, we are seeing the interoperability revolution start to materialize.

 

From a technology perspective, much has been achieved and more is on the roadmap for Mojaloop improvement as the default interoperability software platform. Performance, fraud management, settlement, cross currency, versioning, security are among the domains that were earmarked for improvement in the next Program Increment.


HiPipo Foundation Include Everyone team thank and greatly appreciate all the participants and community contributors including Modusbox, Crosslake, and The Level One Project for steering the project to the current achievement. We are looking forward to the next convening in Zanzibar.