African organisations face an average of 3,153 cyberattacks a week, which is around 60 higher than the global average1. The continent is sitting right in the proverbial thick of the threats, with fraud and attacks costing companies thousands. The African financial sector has seen a 350 increase in fraud losses, and companies like South African Airways, Kenya Urban Roads Authority, Telecom Namibia and Bank of Uganda have been targeted.23 The fintech environment in Africa may be booming, with more than half of the 2.1 billion global registered accounts 74 of global mobile money transactions, but it is also at risk. Security, says Mandla Mbonambi, CEO of Africonology , has to be architected from the first whiteboard sketch, not patched in the week before go-live.
Fintechs that treat security as a late quality assurance step tend to face higher breach risks, delayed launches and failed audits, he says. This is because vulnerabilities are only discovered when changes are expensive and hard to fix. Security-by-design models are a far better approach in the financial services industry because security best practices and protocols are embedded in digital transformation rather than as bolt-on added extras.
Building a product without prioritising security from the outset creates both technical debt and risk. From day one, fintech teams need to assume that every design decision has a regulatory and security impact. Across data flows, API exposure, identity models and even UI flows, teams must prioritise key built-in elements. For example, early threat modelling of payment flows, API gateways, mobile apps and integrations to identify fraud, account takeover, and data-leak paths is essential before code is even written.
