Amid recent cases of money laundering and financial fraud involving some of the leading fintechs and banks in Africa, cybersecurity firms CWG Ghana and Clari5 from India have put forward a suit of real-time monitoring solutions that enables timely intervention and fraud prevention.
CWG Ghana is a subsidiary of CWG PLC, a Pan-African systems solutions company which specializes in a wide array of IT services including communications, and integration services and integration services, infrastructure services, managed and support services, cloud services, and software. The company has maintained a relationship with Clari5 for the past two years to deliver value to its corporate clients across finance, telecoms, energy, insurance, oil and gas, manufacturing and other industries in Ghana.
Clari5 on the other hand is a multiple-award-winning ISO-certified category leading banking financial crime management product innovator that exists for mission-driven banks that are exposed to the global US$4 trillion problem of fraud. Clari5 is now processing 10+ billion transactions and managing 700+ million accounts across marquee banks worldwide. With 200+ million accounts at a single site, Clari5 has the world’s largest implementation of a fraud management solution.
The two have been collaborating for the past two years and have rolled out their award-winning tailor-made and client-focused real-time fraud management solutions in various financial and other corporate institution both in Ghana and other parts of Africa.
Whereas their solutions are delivering great results and value for individual institutions, Clari5 CEO, Rivi Varghese thinks it is time for more centralized solutions that enable all operations of the various institutions to be monitored from one central point to make it even more difficult for fraudsters, whether they operate from within the organization or outside, to succeed.
He was speaking at an exclusive engagement with news editors and senior journalists during a working visit to Ghana.
Rivi Varghese said the ISO certified and multiple award-winning Clari5 solutions are clinical in that they protect not just the systems of the institutions, but also individual customers whose usual behavioural patterns have been fed onto an AI (artificial intelligence) platform and therefore any unusual pattern detected is flagged and blocked by the system.
For instance, in spite of all the solutions deployed by the various financial institutions, Bank of Ghana reported in year 2020 that over 53 percent of fraud in the banking sector were either initiated by or involved workers of the respective banks. Again, Techgh24 recently gathered from a fintech industry expert, that one individual was able to launder money to the tune of about GH¢12 million using some fintech platforms and banks in Ghana last year.
This, according to the expert, was because there is no central fraud management system even though individual institutions may have compliance tools and systems in place at the operator level.
Rivi Varghese noted that the fintech revolution, which has given rise to digital payments across networks and borders, has even made the risk higher, by making it even easier for fraudsters, both outside and within financial institutions to collaborate and operate remotely without being detected on time.
“We are in an era where bank CEOs and staff are unable to sleep at night like they used to because digital payments go on 24/7, so, if you don’t stay alert, you and your clients can be defrauded. This is also a time when banks run a risk taking on fintechs as partners, particularly if those banks do not have effective fraud management systems in place because fintechs open banks up to higher and a wider range of risks,” he stated.
He said the Clari5 solutions deployed in the some of the biggest banks and corporate organisations across India, Africa and in Ghana, promises to protect banks and even fintechs against financial and payments risks including money laundering, identity theft and many more.
Managing Director of CWG Ghana, Harriet Attram Yartey noted that whereas the company has deployed its effective security systems in number of leading institutions across the country, it has also learnt, over the period that several institutions in Ghana see technology and cybersecurity as a cost centre, and so they prefer to avoid it or cut corners for cheaper solutions which eventually fail to deliver value.
According to her, CWG Ghana has particularly made its high-value solutions affordable and cost-effective, backed by very deliberate strategies to enable local institutions derive value from them.
“We are not the type of organization that sell solutions and leave the client to figure it out. We stay with you for a lifetime and sometimes we even leave our staff permanently on location to continue to work with the client to ensure full value,” she said.
She said the suit of solutions CWG Ghana and Clari5 are offering include two-step and multi-step verifications for individual transactions, to ensure micro-level protection for the entire ecosystem.
Harriet Attram Yartey is therefore urging corporate institutions, particularly those in the financial sector to focus more on leveraging technology to drive revenue growth and stem fraud.
She believes that in this era of local and global digitalization, banks that will do effective collection, analysis and protection of customer data will be the winners, adding that, the kind of data analysis required in this era makes it imperative for banks and fintechs to get the right partner, and that is where CWG Ghana and Clari5 come in.
According to her, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the demand for CWG Ghana solutions increased by up to 70 percent, and that is testimony to the value they deliver, adding that the partnership with Clari5 brings quality and cost-effectiveness to the client.
Beyond the solutions it offers its big corporate clients, CWG Ghana is also committed to corporate social responsibility. Every year, the company rewards the best student with a First Class in Computer Science at University of Ghana, Legon. That student gets a laptop and one year internship opportunity with the company.
The Managing Director said the company is working on extending the gesture to other premier institutions of higher learning in Ghana soon.
