A Letter from…Namibia
By Adam Csabay
What Namibia got right about scam infrastructure
Namibia is not waiting to be told what to do about financial fraud — it is already deciding how to build.
That was the clearest signal I took from April's Namibia International Cybersecurity Conference and Exhibition (NICSC) in Windhoek, where regulators, payment system operators, and technology providers sat in the same room with a shared diagnosis and, more unusually, a shared sense of urgency about the fix.
Building trust at speed
Curtis Matlock, CEO of our partner Proto, and I delivered a joint address on what it actually takes to build trust at speed in an environment where scams are outpacing the systems designed to catch them. The core argument was structural: when real-time network analytics and localised, multilingual victim reporting exist as separate tools, the gap between a report being made and any meaningful response being triggered stays wide. Integrating them into a single pipeline closes that gap — a scam victim in a rural area reporting in Oshiwambo can generate an alert that reaches a compliance team and a regulator at the same time, in actionable form. That is not a marginal improvement in speed. It changes the architecture of accountability.
Anti-scam infrastructure as a national utility
The panel that followed sharpened this argument in ways I had not fully anticipated. Joining Curtis, Ernst Naub from the Bank of Namibia, and Mbapeua Kauuova from the Payments Association of Namibia, we spent most of the discussion on a question the audience kept returning to: who owns the infrastructure? Not technically, but politically and operationally. The answer the room kept arriving at — cautiously but consistently — was that no single institution can. Anti-scam infrastructure only works if it is treated as shared national infrastructure, the way payments settlement or electricity grids are treated. The moment one regulator or one bank owns the data exclusively, the network effect collapses.
That framing is significant. It means the barrier to progress in many markets is not technical readiness but governance design — specifically, whether national authorities are willing to build shared accountability frameworks before a crisis forces the issue.
Namibia, from what I observed, is willing to invest in national anti-scam infrastructure before that crisis arrives.
Warm regards, Adam Csabay Global Head of Central Banking
