Certified AI Access, a South African artificial intelligence (AI) trust and risk infrastructure company, has partnered with Reality Defender, a deepfake detection platform, to offer deepfake detection tools in South Africa’s financial sector.
The companies say the integration is designed to help financial institutions identify AI-generated impersonations and synthetic media in real-time, as fraud tactics become more advanced.
This, as AI-enabled fraud – including voice cloning, deepfake impersonation and synthetic identity attacks – increases across the country’s financial system.
Banks have warned customers about more sophisticated scams, while the National Financial Ombud Scheme has reported a rise in AI-generated complaints, some exceeding 100 pages and containing fabricated legal references, the companies say in a statement.
“Traditional fraud systems were built to detect fraud after it happens. AI-generated threats move faster, scale instantly and adapt in real-time,” says Matthew Renirie, co-founder of Certified AI Access.
“The question is no longer whether organisations will be targeted, but whether they have the infrastructure to detect what is real and what is synthetic.”
Renirie notes the partnership integrates Reality Defender’s multimodal detection tools into existing workflows, allowing organisations to monitor different types of media where threats may appear.
Certified AI Access provides AI governance and risk frameworks to financial institutions, corporates and public sector organisations.
Reality Defender’s platform is used by financial institutions, government agencies and multinational companies to detect deepfakes and prevent fraud.
According to the companies, the partnership marks an early deployment of this type of AI threat detection infrastructure in South Africa.
“Synthetic media is being used to exploit trust at scale, and detection has to happen at the speed of the threat,” says Ben Colman, co-founder and CEO of Reality Defender. “This partnership gives South African institutions the ability to verify what is real, in real-time, across everyday interactions.”
Renirie notes the ability to verify information is becoming critical for organisations. “If organisations cannot verify what is real in real-time, they cannot operate with confidence. This isn’t a future risk, it’s an operational one, and the companies that treat trust as infrastructure will be the ones that survive it.”
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