Banking Technology & Cybersecurity: Real-World Engineering
Fraud systems, payments engineering, banking malware, and what building secure financial technology looks like inside one of Africas largest retail banks.
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 Revolutās 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 Ā£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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How Banks Can Break Client Hypnosis: Contextual Authorisation and the Fight Against Social Engineering Fraud
by Andrew Baker 1. Opening: The Client Has Been Captured The fraud victim approving a transaction they believe is a refund is not making a mistake. They are not confused or careless or naive. They are operating under full psychological capture, executing instructions from an authority figure they have been conditioned over the course of […]
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This Strange Machinery: How African Banking Struggles to Lend to Clients
Ride’s “Chrome Waves” is a 1992 B-side that most people will not know, and one of its lines has lodged itself in my thinking about African banking: “this strange machinery, is keeping you from seeing me.” The lyric was written about something entirely personal, a distance between two people that the ordinary machinery of life […]
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Synchronous Transactions in Banking: Why They Cause Failures at Scale and What to Do Instead
The mistake is not synchronous processing. The mistake is dragging unrelated work inside the synchronous boundary. 1. What Users Actually Experience as Real Time There is a particular type of architect that most people in banking technology will recognise immediately: deeply opinionated about correctness, committed to order, and entirely confident that every payment must complete […]
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ShedLock and Payments: Every Way It Can Fail, How to Retry Safely, and Every Lock Type Worth Knowing
1. What ShedLock Is and How It Works Spring Boot makes it trivial to schedule a task. You add @EnableScheduling to a configuration class, annotate a method with @Scheduled, and the framework fires it on your chosen cron or interval. The problem surfaces the moment you deploy more than one instance of your application. In […]
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How Capitec Secures Your Money: Real Answers to Real Questions
Andrew Baker Ā· May 2026 I get asked a lot of questions about how Capitec secures its customersā 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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