Anti-Fraud Project Boosts Security of African, Asian Financial Systems

A nonprofit has launched the first open source platform aimed at delivering sophisticated anti-fraud capabilities to financial systems in Africa as well as parts of Asia and the Middle East.
The Tazama open source project is real-time financial transaction monitoring software that can be deployed by digital financial services providers to detect and block fraudulent transactions and protect consumer accounts.
While large financial firms such as Visa and Mastercard have such capabilities, smaller financial institutions and government agencies in the region do not, making their financial systems prone to fraud and undermining citizens' trust in the system.
Funded by the Linux Foundation Charities and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the open source Tazama project has completed alpha pilot projects in Jordan and South Africa and plans to expand its deployments.
It's already working with the Central Bank of West African States and rural banks in the Philippines, says Greg McCormick, executive director of the Tazama Project at Linux Foundation.
Providing anti-fraud services like Tazama is critical to increasing trust and raising citizens' participation in a country's financial system, which is a key part of overall economic development.
Africa and some nations in the Middle East and Asia lag far behind in account ownership compared with the United States, Europe, and the richer economics of Asia.
Only 27% of adults in Egypt have a bank account, 47% of adults in Jordan, 45% in Kenya, 36% in Burkina Faso, and 45% in Nigeria, according to The Global Findex Database 2021, published by the World Bank.
The Gates Foundation found that delivering banking services to lower-income citizens is a key component of meeting its goal of helping deploy real-time digital payments, which can help economies grow.
In many countries, people are living on just dollars a month, which does not make it profitable for large financial firms to create their own financial networks.
Instead, homegrown systems based on open source software are needed, McCormick says.
Real-Time Fraud Detection The Tazama open source software is a server that takes in information and applies more than 270 different rules, each one of which produces a single answer.
The rules are combined into typologies, which look for particular types of fraud, according to Tazama documentation.
The information flow for a financial transaction in Tazama's anti-fraud platform.
With digital fraud growing in Africa and other parts of the world, such as a recent spate of Magecart attacks on e-commerce websites, protecting the financial system and its participants from fraud is especially timely.
The pilot project's servers are currently running 2,300 transactions per second, which results in detection of fraud in real-time, McCormick says.
Adding AI for Cybersecurity The platform is a machine-learning engine that ingests transaction data in real-time, stores the information in a database, and then uses behavioral modeling to determine whether the transaction is likely legitimate or a sign of fraud, says Justus Ortlepp, product manager for Tazama.
Job fraud, where the criminal offers work to people but then steals their money, is common in some parts of Africa, while laundering funds stolen through other criminal schemes is another common attack on financial systems, says Ortlepp.
The Tazama group plans to build more capabilities into the platform, including explainable AI and other advanced features.
Many targeted countries do not have a cybersecurity-skilled workforce or resources to deploy a complex platform, so using machine learning and AI to make the platform easier to use and manage is important, McCormick says.


This Cyber News was published on www.darkreading.com. Publication date: Mon, 11 Mar 2024 17:35:33 +0000


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