A Global technological company, Mastercard has unveiled measures to ensure that customers’ cashless transactions are free from fraud attacks in Africa and the world at large.
Senior Vice President, Digital Partnerships, Middle East and Africa, Mastercard, Ngozi Megwa revealed this last week when speaking on the sidelines of the just-ended Mobile 360 Africa conference in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.
Organized by GSMA in collaboration with other partners such as Mastercard, the ‘Mobile 360 – Africa’ conference brought on board over 1,000 stakeholders from across the continent and Africa’s Tech and Telecom landscape.
Without revealing fraud incidents in Africa, Megwa admitted that fraud is a challenge and Mastercard has been working hard to ensure that customers’ transactions are free from fraud attacks.
“We’re a technology company in the payment space as one of our core and we’re spending millions of dollars every year on fraud safety and security,” she said, adding: “You can imagine the billions of transactions that go through our networks every second, and we’ve to protect that.”
Megwa revealed: “There is a huge investment that goes into our infrastructure so that we continue to stay ahead of the fraud, we then offer to partners we work with including banks, government to help protect them against fraud.”
Citing examples of fraud solutions, Megwa said: “In Egypt we’ve implemented national fraud system, which means that it captures fraud at the country level, we also have systems that capture fraud at the company and customer level.”
“And that is a core element of our propositions in terms of how we try and protect our partners from getting fraud attacks and it is up to the partners to choose which process he/she wants to use. We invest heavily in maintaining those security systems,” said Megwa.
She further said that digital technology and electronic payments systems are becoming democratized, stressing on the importance of trust and security.
She cited research data which predicted that in 2022, global card and digital payment penetration will be at 60 percent, up from 44 percent today. Trends like open banking will transform the financial services sector, she said.
“A widespread unified digital infrastructure plays a key role in powering inclusive growth for economies,” Megwa emphasized.
Mastercard recently acquired a mobile payments technology company, Oltio from Standard Bank that will further enable the company to complement its digital payment strategy to displace cash in emerging markets across the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region.
This is in recognition of the fact that customers in Middle East and Africa need a secure way to make payment and this will reinforce the digital payment strategy that the company has set about achieving.
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