A Letter From… South Africa: Fraud collaboration and moving beyond isolated efforts
By Adam Casaby
The most striking thing about fraud in South Africa right now is not the scale of it — it is how clearly the people fighting it have decided that no one can fight it alone.
That was the feeling I took away from Johannesburg, where I spent time at the Fraud Intelligence Annual Conference organised by PayInc. It was a timely and much-needed event, and real credit is due to Ursula Pearson-Williams, Odette Smit, Dana Jedrisko and their colleagues for bringing it together. What stayed with me was who was in the room: government, private sector, and law enforcement leaders from right across South Africa's financial ecosystem, in the same place, working through the same problem.
A genuinely shared conversation
So much of the discussion was about the latest trends in the financial crime landscape — but, more importantly, about solutions: what it actually takes to safeguard payment systems as consumer scams and fraud keep rising. No single institution has visibility of the entire fraud chain – collaboration is important for earlier intervention and prevention. Today the question is no longer can we collaborate—it's whether we can collaborate faster than fraud evolves.
That spirit came alive in the panel I was fortunate to join, alongside Odette Smit of PayInc, Nazia Karrim of MoData, Juan Grobbelaar of SABRIC, and Iain Orpen of Capitec. It was a deliberately cross-sector line-up — an industry payments body, a technology provider, the country's collaborative fraud-intelligence body, and one of its largest banks — and that mix was the point. It is genuinely encouraging to see stakeholders from different sectors, industries and jurisdictions move beyond isolated efforts and start working together to disrupt the financial networks that sit behind organised crime, rather than chasing each case in isolation.
What South Africa already has
What makes South Africa stand out is that the instinct to collaborate is not new here. The country already has the relationships and the institutions — bodies like SABRIC, and forums like this conference — that many markets are only beginning to build. The will is there, and so is the trust between the players who need to act together.
That is the foundation everything else is built on. At FNA we are proud to support some of the key initiatives in this area — and we will continue to do so.
Warm regards,
Adam Csabay Global Head of Central Banking
