As Vyntra marks ten years of growth in Africa, we’re sharing a reflection on what a decade working alongside African banks has taught us and what the years ahead are likely to demand.
The payment and fraud landscape 10 years ago
When Vyntra (at the time NetGuardians) opened in Kenya ten years ago, the country had long since made instant payments the default. Driven by M-Pesa, the continent moved from cash to mobile money without ever passing through card infrastructures like Mastercard or Visa. Africa had leapfrogged the conventional financial trajectory entirely, building something faster and more inclusive than most developed markets had managed.
On the fraud side, insider fraud was dominant. While inside the banks, employees with legitimate access to institutional knowledge were quietly the dominant fraud threat. Dormant accounts, deceased customer records, trust accounts that moved slowly and attracted little attention. The fraud was methodical and, precisely because it came from within, genuinely hard to see.
From insider threat to organized social engineering
Over the following decade, the threat landscape shifted in ways that were difficult to anticipate in real time. Social engineering fraud accelerated during Covid-19 through social media networks, exposing a threat that had been growing quietly for years.
Fraud in Africa today is built on social engineering, and the speed at which information spreads today makes it extremely difficult to contain and anticipate. As a result, scams have become part of ordinary transactions — rent payments redirected by SMS impersonation, investment platforms collecting deposits from SMEs who never see returns, SIM swap to access personal bank accounts and drain them.
Regulatory pressure also reshaped the payment environment. Kenya’s grey-listing by the Financial Action Task Force sent a clear signal to the entire region: demonstrating sound financial crime controls was no longer a matter of internal policy — it had direct consequences for a bank’s ability to operate internationally. That shift moved the conversation about financial crime from compliance departments into boardrooms, changing both the urgency and the scope of how institutions approached the problem.
Looking ahead, deepfakes and AI-generated fraud are beginning to reach the region in ways that will accelerate. Voice cloning used to authorize fraudulent transactions, synthetic identities created to pass identity verifications, automated social engineering at a scale no human fraudsters could achieve — these are not distant scenarios.
What African banks must continue to do to fight financial crime
African banks have responded with genuine determination. They have built dedicated crime functions, invested in real-time monitoring, and threated compliance as a strategic priority. The grey-listing moment surely accelerated investments.
Customer awareness programs have also matured significantly. Banks have come to understand that technology alone cannot stop social engineering, and informed customers is part of the defense. Communications around impersonation scams or suspicious payment requests have become more frequent, reflecting a clearer understanding of how fraud reaches people in this market.
Transaction Intelligence: the next frontier for African banking
East Africa’s banking sector has spent a decade building the infrastructure to fight financial crime. The institutions that invested early — in real-time monitoring, in dedicated fraud functions, in compliance as a strategic priority — are now in a meaningfully stronger position than those that treated it as a checkbox. That work was necessary. It is also, by itself, no longer sufficient.
The fraud challenge is not going away. AI-assisted attacks, deep-fake-enabled impersonation, and automated social engineering continue to arrive faster than most regulatory frameworks can respond to. Staying ahead requires the kind of complete visibility into transaction flows that fraud detection alone was never designed to provide — seeing not just what was flagged, but everything, and understanding what it means. This is what we call Transaction Intelligence at Vyntra.
Traditional fraud detection relies on fixed rules and rigid checkpoints — flag this pattern, block that transaction. What transaction intelligence makes possible is fundamentally different: a continuous, evolving picture of how a customer behaves across every payment they make. That depth of understanding is not just a better way to catch fraud. It is the foundation for something the continent urgently needs.
The decade ahead will ask more of East African banks than the last one did: more collaboration, more willingness to treat transaction intelligence as a strategic asset rather than a compliance obligation, but as one of their most valuable assets.
“Transaction Intelligence in Africa is moving beyond financial crime detection and transaction visibility toward something more fundamental: understanding a bank’s customer identity. Transactional behavior is one of the richest sources of learning about a person available today. We can tell you who someone is simply by analyzing how they transact. This shifts Transaction Intelligence from a compliance function into a new pool of value creation: powering loan risk scoring, credit decisioning, and a range of identity-driven financial products yet to be built.” – Joël Winteregg, CEO, Vyntra
Vyntra was formed in 2025 through the merger of NetGuardians and Intix. The combined platform covers transaction fraud prevention and transaction data observability across financial institutions in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
