Banking Technology & Cybersecurity: Real-World Engineering
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Fraud systems, payments engineering, banking malware, and what building secure financial technology looks like inside one of Africas largest retail banks.
One Wallet, One Premium: Rebuilding Credit Around the Client Instead of the Product
There is an asymmetry sitting in plain sight in every retail lending book, and once you notice it you cannot unsee it. Some of the smallest, shortest and most frequently repaid advances we write exhibit extraordinarily low losses, particularly where repayment is tied closely to the customer’s income stream, and yet almost the entire architecture […]
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Scammernomics: How Banks Fight Fraud by Attacking Money Mule Economics
1. Fraud in context: the fraud to market share ratio Fraud numbers mean very little in isolation, because the bank with the most complaints against it is usually just the bank with the most customers, and the only honest way to read the figures is to set them against size. The comparison worth making is […]
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Card Payment Authentication and the Intent Problem: Why Identity, Consent and Authorization Are Not the Same Thing
1. Card Payment Authentication, Consent and Authorization Are Three Different Things 1.1 Who Actually Does What in a Card Payment Because this argument turns on some fine distinctions, it is worth spending a moment on who does what, since the vocabulary of card payments is unhelpfully opaque and the same word often means different things […]
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Security Vibing: Why Teams Keep Sacrificing to the Risk Gods Instead of Managing Real Risk
Something interesting happens inside large organisations when a new technology appears and nobody is quite sure how dangerous it is: people start sacrificing things. A feature gets disabled, a setting gets locked down, and a capability gets removed. Another approval step gets inserted into the process, or someone quietly updates a policy. Everyone feels slightly […]
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From Zero to Exploit Detection: A Practical Guide to Nuclei Templates for Pen Testing
Vulnerability scanning used to mean choosing between a handful of expensive commercial scanners or writing your own scripts for every check you cared about. Nuclei changed that calculation. It is an open source scanning engine built by ProjectDiscovery that runs YAML defined templates against targets, and the template library has grown into one of the […]
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Passkeys in Banking, Part 2: Securing Passkey Enrolment with Browser Registration
This is the second of two articles. Part one, Passkeys in Banking: What They Actually Fix, and What They Quietly Don’t, sets out the benefits and the risks. This part addresses what a bank can do about the risk that matters most. In short. A passkey is a strong credential, and the strength of a […]
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Passkeys in Banking, Part 1: What They Actually Fix, and What They Quietly Don’t
Passkeys are the most consequential change to consumer authentication in twenty years, and they are also being oversold, because the gap between the marketing and the implementation detail is exactly where fraud losses will land. The industry framing is simple enough. Public key cryptography replaces the shared secret, so there is nothing to phish, nothing […]
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Finally, an AI That Understands Money, Part Three: Teaching It What Is Out of Character
Abnormal is always relative. An embedding computed in advance can hold an inbound payment before it arrives, and the same property explains where this approach fails. This is the last of three parts. Part one explains what Revolut’s PRAGMA is and how it works. Part two covers credit and financial inclusion. Where the first two […]
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Finally, an AI That Understands Money, Part Two: The Lending Market Hiding in Your Embeddings
Conventional lending has confused regularity with durability. An AI reading the transaction history directly measures what a payslip cannot, and in a market like South Africa that changes who is lendable at all. This is the second of three parts. Part one explains what Revolut’s PRAGMA is and how it works. Part three covers fraud, […]
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Finally, an AI That Understands Money, Part One: Inside Revolut’s Customer Embeddings
Revolut and NVIDIA have published the most detailed public account yet of an AI that learns a customer straight from their banking history. Part one covers what it is, how it works, and what the results actually prove. This is the first of three parts. Part two looks at what it means for credit and […]
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Capitec Secure Safe and Why a Duress PIN Makes You Less Safe, Not More
1. The problem we are actually solving South Africa’s crime problem has quietly become a banking problem. Criminals no longer need to hack a banking app, they force victims to unlock it themselves. The industry calls this transfer mugging, and it is growing fast. Express kidnappings, where a victim is grabbed and forced to open […]
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The Ever Rising Bar: What the NatWest Thurrock Lawsuit Tells Us About the Limits of Bank Fraud Prevention
1. The claim in outline Liquidators of Rockfire Capital and Rockfire Investment Finance are pursuing NatWest subsidiary RBS for roughly £250m, alleging the bank processed payments that let businessman Liam Kavanagh siphon money out of the Rockfire group for personal use, including a yacht, an aircraft and luxury cars. The money originated with Thurrock Council, […]
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