Financial fraud in South Africa resulted in losses approaching ZAR 3 billion last year, underscoring the growing urgency to strengthen defenses against increasingly sophisticated financial crime. In response, closer collaboration between the mobile, banking, and technology sectors is emerging as a critical line of defense for both consumers and financial institutions.
South Africa has become the second market globally to deploy the Scam Signal platform, following its successful rollout in the UK.
The solution is designed to tackle authorized push payment (APP) fraud, a fast-growing scam category in which criminals deceive individuals or businesses into voluntarily authorizing payments to accounts controlled by fraudsters. These attacks typically rely on advanced social engineering techniques, including impersonation of trusted organizations and time-sensitive pressure tactics, making them particularly difficult for banks to detect or reverse.
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The South African launch of Scam Signal was driven by collaboration between several leading banks, MTN Chenosis, global analytics firm FICO, Jersey Telecom (JT), and the GSMA. The platform went live in October 2025, extending enhanced fraud protection to millions of banking customers nationwide.
Brian Gorman, Fintech Lead at the GSMA, emphasized that partnership across industries was essential to address the scale and complexity of APP fraud. He also highlighted the role of the South African Banking Risk Information Centre (SABRIC), whose coordination efforts helped align banks and mobile operators around a unified response to financial crime.
Scam Signal operates via application programming interfaces (APIs) that connect banking systems with mobile networks. By combining real-time network intelligence with customer and transaction data, the platform enables banks to identify and interrupt social engineering scams as payments are taking place. Predictive risk indicators allow institutions to assess transaction threats more accurately, reducing losses for both customers and banks.
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The solution is integrated into the FICO Omni Channel Engagement platform, allowing financial institutions to deliver personalized, context-aware alerts to customers during high-risk transactions. These timely interventions are designed to disrupt scammers’ tactics and add an additional layer of protection at critical moments.
As digital banking fraud continues to rise, platforms such as MTN Chenosis enable banks to embed fraud prevention into onboarding, authentication, and payment journeys without the need to build new infrastructure or manage multiple integrations. Scam Signal also complements a broader suite of API-based capabilities offered by South African mobile operators, including real-time identity verification, SIM-swap detection, and fraud risk scoring.
Reflecting on deployments in both the UK and South Africa, Gorman said:
One lesson stands out: cross-industry collaboration is the key to success. In the UK, meaningful collaboration across the ecosystem has proven transformative. Deployments with major MNOs have been described as game-changing, delivering improved detection rates of up to 40% while delivering a false positive ratio of 3:1 for certain strategies.
In South Africa, close engagement with banks and SABRIC has reinforced the value of a coordinated, ecosystem-wide approach to tackling emerging threats.
Waseem Amra, GM for Products and Platforms at MTN Chenosis, added:
Our development approach is rooted in industry insights and a clear understanding of the business problem. By drawing lessons from UK deployments and engaging closely with South African banks and partners, we have tailored this service specifically for our market.
Following its successful launches in the UK and South Africa, plans are already underway to expand Scam Signal into additional markets, extending its fraud prevention capabilities to banking customers globally.
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