Winigroup Ltd, Nigeria’s leading, IT Security, Risk Management Solutions Company in Nigeria and experts in the banking and financial technology industry have called for stronger collaboration among the regulatory authorities, commercial banks and information technology security industry to secure Nigeria’s electronic payment system from activities of cyber criminals.

Mr. Tunde Lemo, former deputy governor, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), speaking at a total fraud protection forum organised in Lagos by Winigroup Ltd and Easy Solutions Ltd to sensitize the banking industry of the latest threats from hackers and electronic fraudsters, said banks need to create a secured environment, brand and fraud intelligence, safe browsing and device analytics.

“I recall that fraud incidence on magnetic stripe was as much as 90 per cent until we introduced chip and pin. We can only fight fraud if we work together.   Unless we have a forum for cross-fertilisation of ideas, we may not know what the other guys are doing.”

He urged CBN to quickly galvanise banks to get better technology solutions to deter electronic frauds and take up consumer protection.

Mr. Dipo Fatokun, director, banking and payments system, CBN said WiniGroup has been a partner in the journey towards combating e-fraud and secure e-payments ecosystem.

He said CBN along with relevant stakeholders are exploring ways to establish an industry Security Operations Centre and a Risk Information Centre, to consolidate its strength at reducing e-payments fraud to the barest minimum and enhancing trust in payments system.

Mr. Jeremy Boorer, director, Europe, Middle East and Africa for Easy Solutions, the only security vendor focused on the comprehensive detection and prevention of electronic fraud across all devices, channels and clouds, said Nigerian banks are up in a battle with e-fraudsters who are daily devising new strategies to steal financial information and money from bank accounts.

He called on the banks to urgently deploy mobile fraud prevention, transaction risk monitoring, fraud intelligence, cloud and email authentication, safe browsing and clientless malware detection on their electronic channels.

He said banks need to take proactive mitigation for account takeover, internet scams and malicious activity against their brands.

He said banks need to have proactive malware detection and threat analytics on their customer devices, real-time transaction anomaly detection and risk evaluation, transparently deploy multi-layered security in their mobile banking application as well as stop email spoofing with fastest path to full DMARC application.

He also advised that they deploy transparent malware protection for all clients with zero friction, multi-factor authentication for web and cloud applications.

He however warned that there are fake apps claiming to come from banks, saying once downloaded and financial information entered included credit/debit cards details and personal identity numbers, the bank customer money is gone as the fraudster will clone the cards or transfer monies immediately.

Mr. Tim Akano, vice chairman, Winigroup, convener of the anti-fraud forum said fraudsters are using Bank Verification Number (BVN) policy and other means to dupe bank customers. He welcomed CBN’s collaboration with experts within and outside the banking industry as well as law enforcements agencies under the Nigeria electronic Fraud Forum (NeFF) to take advantage of new ideas including the ones expressed at the forum.