Testing

Tag: nfc

  • Mobile Money – Are your customers secure?

    Mobile Money – Are your customers secure?

    KARIBU !!!

    ‘ M-Pesa’  has been leading the revolution of mobile wallets across the globe. Over 50% of the adult population in Kenya today use M-Pesa service to send money to far-flung relatives, to pay for shopping, utility bills or taxi ride home. While East Africa has been dominating the numbers in the past few years other regions including APAC, EMEA, Europe and Americas are about to explode sooner or later with their own models – NFC, Google Wallets, Mwallets, Apple Passbook,etc

    More operators are walking down the path of offering Mobile Banking services in some form or the other every year. These players might get caught off-guard & face what a leading operator in Uganda recent got  hit with– a million dollar mobile money fraud loss !! News articles indicate that a recent internal fraud in a leading operator in Uganda lead to 3.5 Million Dollar loss, Mobile Money boss losing his job & 8 other employees getting fired. Operator also received reprimands from the regulator and had significant dent to its brand image. This mess also opened up competition for other players in the country.  Regaining confidence of customers and regulators will not be an easy job for such operators. They will be looking to enhance security within their mobile money offerings.  It might be a differentiator and lead to uplift in adoption.

    This incedence clearly presents a learning for other operators about to offer Mobile Money services. Moving forward, one of the key areas of focus for operators will be to provide a secure mobile money platform to users and manage frauds beyond the traditional regulatory requirements. Below infographic highlights some variants of Mobile Money frauds already rampant within operations and potential damage they might cause.

    Mobile-Money-Risks-Infographic14

  • An economical approach to Mobile Money?

    An economical approach to Mobile Money?

    It’s clear to all that the advance of mobile money and NFC services has become an unstoppable force, with the latest estimates putting global NFC m-payment transactions at US$50 billion by 2014. For the Fraud & Security teams in mobile operators this heralds arguably the single biggest change in the risk landscape since the original proliferation of mobile services back in the late 90s and early 00s.

    Where there is money, there is fraud. It was therefore inevitable that when mobile phones became a financial instrument, they would immediately become a target for fraud. Mobile phones were already a very popular target for fraudsters and the combining of the 2 is simply irresistible. This has presented Fraud & Security teams with a fresh sets of challenges and opportunities, the first of which is how they are going to monitor the new services.

    Many operators are looking to the financial services industry for best practice and whilst this certainly makes sense, I’m not so sure that the purchase of monitoring tools from the financial services environment is as wise. By buying in such systems, mobile operators run the risk of creating a siloed view of their customers, with one system looking at mobile money usage and others looking at calls, SMS etc. Surely the most effective way forward is to have a single view of every customer, assessing risk across all services.

    Almost all operators have some form of Fraud Management System (FMS), monitoring their customers’ calls, SMS and data traffic. Mobile money services are relatively simple when compared to those offered by banks and insurers and the same is true of the data that they produce. It is therefore well within the capability of an FMS to take in mobile money and NFC transaction data and present it alongside the calls, SMS and data usage.

    To avoid unnecessary expenditure and inefficient use of resource, my advice to mobile operators is to challenge your FMS supplier to provide you with a solution for monitoring your mobile money services. Only if their answer is ‘no can do’ should you be looking elsewhere!!