Category: Banking + Cyber
How Capitec Secures Your Money: Real Answers to Real Questions
Andrew Baker · May 2026 I get asked a lot of questions about how Capitec secures its customers’ money. Not in the abstract, but the real ones: what happens if someone swaps my SIM, can someone drain my account while I am on hold with the fraud line, how do you stop someone inside the […]
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Hidden Bank Fees Exposed: How AI Will End Fee Smuggling
There is nowhere left to hide. For decades, banks built an elegant asymmetry into the relationship with their customers. The bank had a team of specialists, the time to design products, and the lawyers to draft disclosure documents that were technically correct and practically unreadable. The customer had a life to live and, at the […]
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Lock It Down: The Complete Guide to Securing Your WhatsApp
Your WhatsApp account is not just a chat app. It is your identity, your contacts, your banking OTPs, your family photos, and your most private conversations. When criminals take it over, they use it immediately to impersonate you and defraud everyone you know. This guide walks through every meaningful control available to you, explains what […]
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Banking Malware on Android: How to Spot It and Stay Safe
Published by Andrew Baker and the Capitec App Security Team | March 2026 For media enquiries and quotable statistics from this article, see the Press Summary at the end. Every day, approximately 15 million South Africans open the Capitec app to check their balance, pay a bill, or send money to a loved one. It […]
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Capitec Pulse: The Engineering Behind Real-Time AI at Scale
By Andrew Baker, Chief Information Officer, Capitec Bank The Engineering Behind Capitec Pulse 1. Introduction I have had lots of questions about how we are “reading our clients minds”. This is a great question, but the answer is quite complex – so I decided to blog it. The article below really focuses on the heavy […]
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Why Core Banking Was a Bad Idea From the Start
A companion piece to Core Banking Is a Terrible Idea. It Always Was. It is 1972. A group of very serious men in very wide ties are gathered in a very beige conference room. They are about to make decisions that will haunt your change advisory board fifty years from now. The following is a […]
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XZ Utils Backdoor: How One Engineer Saved the Internet
On a quiet Friday evening in late March 2024, a Microsoft engineer named Andres Freund was running some routine benchmarks on his Debian development box when he noticed something strange. SSH logins were taking about 500 milliseconds longer than they should have. Failed login attempts from automated bots were chewing through an unusual amount of […]
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Quantum Computing Threat to Encryption: What You Must Know
Published on andrewbaker.ninja | Enterprise Architecture & Banking Technology There is a quiet revolution happening in physics laboratories around the world, and most of the people who should be worried about it are not paying attention yet. That is about to change. Quantum computing is advancing faster than anyone predicted five years ago, and when […]
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Why Core Banking Architecture Has Always Been Flawed
The COBOL apocalypse conversation this week has been useful, because it has forced the industry to confront something it has been avoiding for decades. But most of the coverage is stopping at the wrong point. Everyone is talking about COBOL. Nobody is talking about the architectural philosophy that COBOL gave birth to, the one that […]
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How a Blog Post Wiped $30 Billion from IBM in One Day
Anthropic published a blog post on Monday. Not a product launch, not a partnership announcement, not a keynote at a major conference. Just a simple blog post explaining that Claude Code can read COBOL. IBM proceeded to drop 13%, its worst single day loss since October 2000, with twenty five years of stock resilience gone […]
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