ITWeb, in partnership with ACI Worldwide, conducted a survey on payments modernisation in the age of digital and instant payments.
The survey aimed to better understand the rapid evolution of digital payments across Africa.
A total of 89 responses were received, with 66% of participants occupying management-level positions in organisations aligned with the digital payments industry.
Here are some of the key findings:
- The payment types that have grown the most over the past 12 months are cards (45%), real-time (instant) payments (42%) and account-to-account transfers (31%).
- The shift toward more digital and real-time payments has had the following impact on respondent organisations’ urgency to modernise payments infrastructure: Significantly (28%), Moderately (26%), Not at all (16%), Slightly (16%) and Extremely (15%).
- The top three fraud/scam types that have increased most for respondent organisations over the past 12 months are:
- App scams/social engineering (63%)
- QR code/payment link scams (22%)
- SIM swap/telecom fraud (17%)
- Sixty percent of respondents said that faster payments (instant/real-time) improved their ability to manage fraud compared to traditional payment rails, while 22% said it reduced their ability to manage fraud.
- Asked about their organisation’s use of AI in fraud management, 35% said they weren’t currently using AI, 30% said they had pilot or limited use cases, and 13% said AI use was established in specific channels. Ten percent of respondents said AI was integrated across multiple channels, while 8% said it was fully orchestrated across the payment lifecycle.
- When it comes to controls that are currently in place for digital payments, respondents reported real-time transaction monitoring (65%), customer confirmation/step-up verification (risk-based) (53%), customer education and scam warnings (40%), behavioural analytics/device intelligence (37%) and payee verification/beneficiary validation (33%).
- Most (73%) respondents said that fraud risk had increased with the growth of digital payments.
- Respondents’ top five priorities for payments’ modernisation for the next 12-24 months were ranked as follows:
- Real-time payments enablement expansion (57%)
- Fraud platform modernisation (43%)
- API enablement/open banking readiness (34%)
- Cloud migration/resilience improvements (25%)
- Payment hub/rail consolidation and centralisation (25%)
- The primary drivers behind the above priorities were listed as:
- Fraud reduction (61%)
- Customer experience (55%)
- Compliance (45%)
- Cost efficiency (34%)
- New products or revenue growth (21%)
- Survey respondents were asked which three KPIs defined success for their payment’s modernisation initiatives. Fraud detection (capture) rate was at the top of the list at 47%; followed by fraud loss rate (44%) and system uptime and reliability (33%).
- The single biggest blocker to improving payments and fraud KPIs was legacy systems or fragmented platforms (34%).