Omnichannel fraud needs an omnichannel brain

Your mobile banking system spots an unfamiliar device. Your payments platform sees a new beneficiary. Your mobile money service processes an unusual transfer. Viewed separately, each event might raise a question. Viewed together, they could reveal an attack in progress.

Take Africa’s payment ecosystem for example, where banking, card, wallet and mobile money services intersect. Connecting signals across these services matters. While the mix differs between markets, the challenge is shared: a customer’s payment journey can extend beyond a single channel, and so can a fraud attempt. Detection and prevention need to follow that journey.

Meeting this challenge requires information from connected channels to be analysed together. AI and machine learning models in fraud systems can use that information to build behavioural profiles for customers, accounts and devices, establishing normal patterns against which new activity can be assessed. These profiles can adapt as behaviour changes, helping distinguish potential threats from genuine changes in customer habits.

Consider a transfer to a mobile money wallet that falls within the permitted payment limits. The customer regularly makes similar transfers, so a payment check alone may find little cause for concern. But this transfer is to a new beneficiary, from an unfamiliar device, shortly after contact details were changed through another channel. Assessed against the customer’s established behaviour, the sequence presents a different level of risk. Behavioural profiling and anomaly detection, working alongside fraud rules, help inform whether the transfer should proceed, require further verification or be stopped.

That connected view depends on information reaching the fraud prevention platform in time to act. Banking systems, payment platforms and relevant partners need to supply signals quickly enough for activity in one channel to influence decisions in another. As institutions expand the services they offer and connect to, their fraud prevention capabilities need to extend with them.

Across Africa’s varied payments markets, the goal is the same: recognise suspicious behaviour across the services customers use, while allowing legitimate activity to continue with minimal disruption. Fraud does not start afresh each time it enters a different channel. Fraud prevention cannot afford to either.