General News
How to Build More Connected & Inclusive Cities
By Carlos Menendez,
Carlos Menendez is president, Enterprise Partnerships, for Mastercard. In this role, Mr. Menendez is responsible for expanding the company’s operations globally with partnerships in the Smart Cities, Retail, Travel and Banking space. In this piece, he looks at ways to build more connected and inclusive cities.
When thinking about the cities of the future, I know that they will be more connected, and I strongly believe that they must be more inclusive.
We can’t have the Internet of Everything without the Inclusion of Everyone. Already today, a growing number of cities are using smart technologies to better connect people to places and to each other – and more importantly also connecting people to opportunities for better and safer lives.
Unfortunately, what still causes a significant amount of friction in our cities and prevents inclusive growth is the dominance of cash. In fact, close to 85 percent of all consumer payments in the world are still done with cash or checks.
This means that far too many people are trapped by default in an informal economy. They lack the financial services to guard themselves against risk, save for themselves, plan for their children’s futures, and build better lives.
Two years ago, Mastercard set a global goal to bring 500 million people into the financial mainstream by 2020. And we’re well on our way to doing that.
In just a few short years, we have helped connect more than 300 million people through partnerships with banks, governments, retailers, and NGOs.
We’re also working with our partners to enable and grow 40 million small merchants and micro-entrepreneurs because it’s not just individuals that are too often trapped in a cash economy – stores lose billions of dollars every year to leakage and theft.
Success Factors For Future Interconnected and Inclusive Cities
It’s no secret that the world is becoming more urban. The UN estimates that within the next generation, the number of people living in cities will jump from 50 percent today to almost 70 percent.
Already today, cities are grappling with the challenges that come with their growth. Congestion, pollution, and poverty are features of many of the world’s major cities, and it will take a collaborative effort by the public and private sector to meet these challenges.
We have seen progress, and there are some common themes around how we can leverage technologies and partnerships to move toward more connected, more inclusive cities.
Transforming Public Transportation
The key approach is to tackle those sectors in our cities that have high levels of everyday cash usage, and one of these areas is mass transit.
About 65 percent of all urban transportation is still paid in cash, which adds up in significant operational costs to transport providers and puts drivers and passengers at risk of getting robbed.
In over 100 cities around the globe (including London, Singapore, Bogota and New York), Mastercard users are paying their train or bus fare simply by tapping their card or swiping their phone.
Only a couple of weeks ago, Sydney became the first city in Australia to introduce contactless payments for public transport – no more queuing in front of tickets booths, topping up cards, or fumbling for cash.
In London, already 40 percent of daily pay-as-you-go journeys on the city’s underground, buses, and commuter rails are paid by contactless cards/phones – which has dropped Transport for London’s cost of selling tickets from 14 to 9 percent of the fare and has saved them over 100 million pounds in cash related costs.
Once payments are digitized, data insights help city governments better understand and connect with their citizens. In Chicago for example, UI LABS, is bringing technology and transportation providers together to find ways to better balance transit supply and demand across a city.
When people use their cards for public transport, this can help form a habit of paying electronically in shops and stores as well which can be a critical factor for enabling broader financial inclusion.
For instance, those living in a cash economy face significant risks when it comes to putting away money for savings. This lack of savings then makes it challenging for people to access lower priced weekly or monthly tickets, instead of more expensive daily tickets.
This is why a few weeks ago, the Government of Mexico City announced its plans to launch a debit card that can be used for both transit payments as well as every day purchases, and potentially social disbursements.
Empowering Small and Micro Businesses
Another critical angle to building more inclusive cities is to focus on the role of small businesses and how to connect them to electronic commerce.
In most parts of the world, small businesses account for well over 90 percent of all enterprises. However, small and micro entrepreneurs have historically been underserved when it comes to their ability to accept electronic payments. For a small market vendor, bigger tickets and additional sales from someone using their card instead of cash are important steps on the economic ladder, which are typically followed by better access to credit.
There are various ways to address this. One is by turning a seller’s mobile phone into a payment terminal. Masterpass QR, which is already available in eight countries in Africa and Asia, is a new electronic payment option that lets customers pay for goods and services from their mobile phones by scanning a QR code displayed at a store’s checkout.
In Kenya, Mastercard is partnering with Unilever to simplify the way smaller stores order and pay for their goods with a wholesaler.
Today, this is a very cash intensive process. Digitizing this process will give small entrepreneurs better access to funds, facilitate inventory ordering and management, and provide better sales insights about their business.
Partnering with Governments
Like businesses and individuals, governments make and receive payments. And many governments around the world choose electronic methods for things like procurement, social benefit payments, or tax collection. Electronic payments are not only more efficient and more transparent, they’re also a great way to lead by example.
At Mastercard, we have partnered with over 60 governments globally to deliver more than 1,600 scalable cashless programs in various cities and communities around the world.
In the Middle East and Africa, we have joined forces with public institutions on solutions that link a government identity with payments and enable people to become financially included on a massive scale. In Egypt, the government plans to extend financial inclusion to over 54 million citizens through a digital National ID program.
But what’s most important for many people, is that this may be the first time they see their name printed on a financial instrument. This gives them a financial identity, and it may give them the first chance to move out of the cash economy into the formal economy.
Technology as the Great Enabler
Simplifying access to public transport, empowering small and micro businesses, promoting cashless programs – what these three areas have in common is that technology works as a great enabler. While the know-how exists to solve many of the world’s most pressing problems, no one can meet these challenges on their own.
It takes partnerships across businesses, governments, NGOs and academia to advance more connected and more inclusive cities – and to build healthier, safer and more prosperous communities.
PalmPay, Nigeria’s leading digital banking platform, has renewed its commitment to deepening financial inclusion across the country. At the CeBIH Annual Conference 2025, themed “Reimagining Financial Inclusion through Cultural Shifts in Consumer Credit,” PalmPay’s Managing Director, Chika Nwosu, urged industry players to deepen financial inclusion by embracing community-aligned solutions and customer-centric innovations that can better serve Nigeria’s underserved and unbanked populations.
Speaking during a panel session titled “Social Inclusion, A Veritable Tool for Financial Inclusion,” Chika Nwosu joined other industry leaders to share insights on strengthening participation among women, rural dwellers, low-income earners, and other financially excluded groups.
Chika Nwosu highlighted PalmPay’s commitment to inclusive finance through its 500,000-strong agent network, which enables seamless cash-in/cash-out services for unbanked users across Nigeria. He also emphasised the importance of PalmPay’s USSD platform, 861#, which allows users with basic phones or limited internet access to perform essential financial transactions.
“Financial inclusion goes beyond access; it must be equitable and tailored to real-life needs,” Chika Nwosu said. He shared how PalmPay leverages behavioural insights to design impactful services, including affordable health insurance, reliable bill payments, merchant solutions, and automated savings features that support financial discipline among users.
The session further examined the role of grassroots agents and community touchpoints in driving last-mile adoption. Chika Nwosu noted that PalmPay’s widespread community presence continues to build trust and encourage excluded populations to embrace digital financial tools.
The session was moderated by Ronke Kuye of the CeBIH Advisory Council and featured representatives from E-Doc Online, SmartCash Payment Service Bank, SANEF, and EFINA.
PalmPay reaffirmed its commitment to driving accessible, secure, and inclusive financial services for all Nigerians. PalmPay is a leading digital banking platform driving financial inclusion and economic empowerment in underserved emerging markets. Through its secure, user-friendly, and inclusive suite of financial services, PalmPay empowers individuals and businesses with tools to manage and grow their money.
PalmPay offers a comprehensive range of products, including mobile payments, savings, and micro-insurance via its app and mobile money agent network.
Since launching in Nigeria in 2019 under a Mobile Money Operator license, the platform has grown to over 35 million app users. PalmPay has operations in Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, and Bangladesh.
Reality Defender and 1Kosmos have announced a strategic partnership that will see the deepfake detection firm integrate its real-time deepfake defenses into 1Kosmos’ blockchain-based biometric authentication platform.
Deepfake
A release says the integration enhances the platform’s existing PAD capabilities with new signals on both live and pre-recorded AI-generated image and video impersonations: “multimodal deepfake detection” that “enhances ISO/IEC 30107-3 PAD Level 2 performance to counter the growing share of synthetic-media attacks.”
“Deepfake attacks are evolving faster than most organizations can adapt, and detecting them requires specialized, continuously updated models,” says Ben Colman, CEO of Reality Defender. Reality Defender’s models keep pace with regulatory changes like the EU AI Act and upcoming ISO 25456 standards, to ensure seamless compliance.
“Advances in AI-generated impersonations are rewriting the rules of identity assurance and ratcheting up fraud losses,” says Mike Engle, chief strategy officer for 1Kosmos. “By adding Reality Defender as an embedded detection layer, we’re enabling enterprises to verify identity with greater certainty and stop AI-driven impersonation attacks before they result in financial loss, brand damage, or regulatory consequences.”
The product deploys without friction, integrating natively into existing 1Kosmos workflows, identity stacks, and user experiences with no new licenses, retraining or rearchitecture.
Resemble AI heads straight to market with new funding
Resemble AI has raised 13 million dollars in strategic funding to accelerate development on its voice generation and deepfake detection products. An announcement says the investment round includes Google’s AI Future Fund, Okta Ventures, Taiwania Capital, Gentree Fund, IAG Capital Partners, Berkeley Frontier Fund and KDDI – partnerships, the firm says, that “create immediate paths to market distribution and embed our technology within key identity and security ecosystems.”
The company says its deepfake detection model achieves 98 percent accuracy across more than 40 languages with multimodal threat detection across audio, video, images and text, and enhanced explainability for content analysis. It intends to use the investment to “fuel our global expansion and accelerate the development of our AI detection platform.”
FARx releases new multimodal deepfake detection tool
FARx, which bills itself as “the world’s only fused-biometrics company,” has announced the launch of FARx 2.0, its new generation of biometric software which fuses speaker, speech and face recognition for added capabilities in synthetic and cloned voice detection. The software can be integrated into browsers, apps and communication systems, and operates in the background to provide continuous multi-factor authentication without disruption.
A post on the firm’s LinkedIn page says FARx 2.0 “identifies not just what is being said but who is speaking, enabling it to detect and block attempts to spoof someone’s identity using synthetic voices, deepfakes, or cloned audio and video.” Trained on some 55,000 synthetic voices from real telephony environments, it can “reliably distinguish between real and AI-generated voices.”
The Malvern Gazette quotes Clive Summerfield, CEO of the Worcestershire, UK-based firm, who says the new product aims to deliver “an even more sophisticated, flexible biometric multi-factor authentication technology to users across a broad range of industries and applications.”
“Legacy voice biometrics and traditional MFA systems are simply no longer enough to outsmart the new era of AI-powered threats.”
The launch follows a recent investment of 250,000 pounds (about US$337,00) through the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS).
Grant funds deepfake tool tailored to South Korea, Singapore
A team from Singapore Management University (SMU) has won a grant to develop a deepfake detection tool. A release says the project will be “the first multilingual deepfake data set that includes dialectal variants such as Singlish and Korean dialects.”
“Many existing tools don’t perform well on Asian languages, accents, or content,” says Professor He Shengfeng, who leads the team. “We’re focused on building something that fits the specific needs of our region.”
Understanding different linguistic, socio-cultural and environmental characteristics was a key requirement for the grant, which comes from AI Singapore (AISG) and South Korea’s Institute for Information & Communication Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP).
The team has dubbed its tool DeepShield, which its proposal paper calls “the first unified interpretable detection system capable of handling diverse and multi-modal manipulations – including object insertions, lighting alterations, background swaps, and voice dubbing – within a single, explainable pipeline.”
Overall, DeepShield wants to position itself as “not merely a detection tool, but a next-generation AI governance layer for digital media integrity – setting it apart from commercial offerings in both ambition and design.” The ultimate goal is a spin-off startup that He imagines licensing services such as deepfake forensics, media authenticity verification, enterprise compliance and digital governance to public and private enterprise.
Work commences in January 2026 with the scouring of large-scale, publicly available datasets such as the YouTube8M dataset.
Ant International’s winning deepfake detector looks to eliminate bias
Ant International has won first place at the NeurIPS Competition of Fairness in AI Face Detection. A release from the company says its entry trumped over 2,100 submissions from 162 teams globally.
The deepfake detection contest challenged participants to develop AI models that “not only achieve high-utility performance but also demonstrate fairness across demographic subgroups such as gender, age, and skin tone.”
“A biased AI is an insecure AI,” says Dr. Tianyi Zhang, general manager of risk management and cybersecurity at Ant International. “Our model’s fairness prevents exploitation from deepfakes and ensures reliable identity verification for all users, supporting our mission to deliver secure and inclusive financial services worldwide.”
The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) is set to develop a comprehensive security master plan for tertiary institutions nationwide.
The Chairman of the Board of Trustees (BoT), TETFund, Aminu Bello Masari, made this known during his remark at the opening ceremony of a two-day workshop on campus security towards the development of a security master plan for tertiary institutions in Nigeria, held in Abuja.
He outlined the various threats faced by tertiary institutions, including banditry, kidnapping and cyber intrusions.
Masari explained that the master plan aims to enhance threat prevention, detection and response capabilities.
According to him, the discussion at the workshop, which was attended by all the chief security officers of all tertiary institutions, will cover various aspects of campus security, including intelligence gathering and emergency response mechanisms.
He stressed the shared responsibility of campus security among government, security agencies, administrators, students, staff and communities.
The workshop is described as a critical national document that will shape campus security policies and operations.
He encouraged participants to approach the deliberations with dedication, innovation and practical solutions, adding that outcomes of the workshop will significantly impact the safety of campuses and the future of Nigerian tertiary education.
The participants, including chief executives, deans, security officers, and law enforcement representatives, were encouraged to share experiences and practical solutions to ensure robust, future-proof campus security.
“What we begin here today is not merely another conference. It is a foundational step in developing a comprehensive, forward looking security master plan for tertiary institutions in Nigeria.
“This master plan is expected to establish a security of time framework for all time sharing institutions to transcend institutional capacity for threat prevention, detection, mitigation and response, promote intelligence-led security operations and proactive risk management, protect students, staff, facilities, infrastructure and intellectual assets, deepen collaboration between institutions, security agencies and host communities institutionalized emergency preparedness, crisis management and business continuity protocols and integrate modern, physical and digital security technologies into campus operation.
“These deliberations are not theoretical. They form the building blocks of the national framework that will guide campus security policies, investments and operations for years to come. I am particularly encouraged by this diversity of participants. Present here are chief executives, Dean of Student Affairs, chief security officers, ICT professionals, security analysts and the representatives of law enforcement agencies,” he stated.
In his remarks, the Executive Secretary, TETFund, Sunny Echono, pointed out that some campuses are porous and easily invaded, making them attractive targets for criminals.
He recalled a previous mapping exercise to identify high-risk areas and establish emergency response mechanisms.
He said there is a need to interface with various agencies and units in case of a security breach, ensuring clear communication channels.
Echono stressed the importance of having clear communication channels to alert and respond to security breaches, involving agencies like the military, police and Civil Defence.
“Those high-risk areas we identified and see how you can have some emergency response mechanism. This is only the first layer that is there, at the security layer at the source. Naturally, you know you have to interface with so many other agencies and units in the events of such an occurrence,” he said.
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