Africa-focused payment solutions provider EFT Corporation has announced a new partnership with ACI Worldwide to protect customers from fraud.

As part of the deal, EFT will rollout ACI’s Fraud Management Solution across all Eastern and Southern African countries which include: Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Botswana, Mauritius etc.

The partners say the solution is platform agnostic and monitors all channels, including web, mobile, ATM and POS platforms.

Jerry Shikhule, Senior Commercial Lead for ACI Worldwide, East Africa said: “ACI Worldwide and EFT Corporation have been working together for over 20 years to provide incredible experiences to customers across Africa. This includes working on over five national switches and partnering with over 30 major customers across the continent. We’re excited to roll out our fraud management solution, to strengthen the security and capability of our network, protecting customers and our improving services.”

Grant Flanagan, Chief Operating Officer of EFT Corporation added: “This is yet another exciting milestone in EFT’s rapid growth journey, allowing us to work with ACI Worldwide to offer world-class fraud protection to our customers across multiple countries. This partnership will enable our customers to identify and mitigate financial fraud and help reduce the compliance burden in all forms.”

Rising wave of cybercrime

In June this year, ITWeb reported that in his keynote presentation at ITWSS2022, Lt Colonel James Emerson, VP of the National White Collar Crime Centre (NW3C) in the US, said, “South Africa had the third-highest number of cyber crime victims in the world as I understand the statistics available publicly. This cost South Africa somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2.2 billion rand according to Accenture.”

He added that in 2021, web applications, e-mail applications and virtual private networks were compromised at every level. I

n addition, 66 zero day exploits were detected - roughly twice the number from the previous year.

In 2022, the number of Trojan-PSW (Password Stealing Ware) detections in Kenya increased by 16% when compared to the same period in 2021 - 12 639 detections in 2022 compared to 10 934 in 2021. Trojan-PSW is a malware that steals passwords, along with other account information, which then allows attackers to gain access to the corporate network and steal sensitive information.