Stopping fraud before it happens

Staying ahead of fraud

Traditional fraud detection relies on historical data – such as past spending behaviour, payment patterns or known fraud signals – to flag suspicious transactions. With this approach, fraud is addressed after it has already happened. But what happens when a fraudster creates a new account? There’s no transaction history to compare it against, making it hard to spot fraudulent activity.

But we’ve changed that.

We’ve started recording every single payment across every banking channel in realtime using a serverless AWS Aurora database to keep your money safe. Combined with other new technologies – including Memgraph, Flink, Kafka, and SageMaker – our fraud prevention system instantly identifies potential threats.

This realtime risk scoring enables us to evaluate payments and proactively block fraudulent transactions before they happen – instead of reacting after the damage has been done. This means that even if we’ve never seen a payment to a particular bank account before, we can instantly determine whether it poses a risk.

When we haven’t seen payments to a particular account recently, or ever, you may be asked to complete a quick security screening. This helps us confirm that the payment is legitimate and protects you from scams.

Blocking payments to known scams

Our app is now directly connected to our fraud centre in realtime. What does this mean for you?

When you try to pay a high-risk recipient, you’ll immediately receive a warning. If a beneficiary has already been reported for fraud, our system blocks the transaction before money leaves your account. Even scammers who open brand-new accounts at other banks can be identified and blocked if there are confirmed fraud reports linked to them.

This is a first in South African banking – realtime, proactive fraud prevention, proudly built by our own software engineering team.

And our latest fraud prevention measures are proving to be successful.

So successful that an individual complained that they had to open a different bank account to invest in Tiger Agriculture, now exposed as a Ponzi scam, because we had blocked payments to the company.

Why? Because our system proactively flagged it as a scam. And it was right.

This is just one example of how we're protecting your money by staying ahead of fraud.

How you can protect yourself

• Always double-check payment details before you send money
• Never share your login details or passwords
• Watch out for red flags – if something seems too good to be true, it probably is
• Keep your app updated for the latest security features
• Trust our security warnings if we flag a payment as suspicious