As South Africa exits the FATF greylist, banks looking to implement effective and sustainable financial crime prevention measures should follow other leading banks and include shared contact centre intelligence in the counter-fraud mix, writes Pete Moorhead.
Good news at last for South Africa’s banks and investors as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global financial crime watchdog, removes South Africa from its greylist and ends over two years of ‘increased monitoring’ of transactions going through the country. Now, as the focus shifts to sustaining effective financial crime prevention measures, banks should make intelligence sharing a priority, and starting with contact centre data is an easy win.
South Africa’s National Treasury, while congratulating all involved on their collective efforts, reminds the sector that the greylist exit is the ‘start of a broader process’ and banks should ensure systems become ‘increasingly effective in combating money laundering, terrorism financing and proliferation financing’. So where should the banks wishing to restore trust in South Africa’s financial services start? SABRIC’s (South African Banking Risk Information Centre) reported 86% surge in digital banking fraud with losses reaching R1.9 billion and its call for proactive and collaborative strategies to protect consumers, offer a good steer.
Tap contact centre intelligence
At Smartnumbers, we certainly back this call for collaborative strategies, given the successes the leading banks we work with have seen when sharing intelligence and working together to combat fraud and financial crime. So, we recommend South African banks to look at their contact centre activity as a priority.
While the overall scale of fraud in banks worldwide is well understood, the role contact centres play in enabling these crimes is often overlooked. Criminals exploit the relative vulnerability of contact centres to harvest customer details or validate data they have acquired elsewhere and use it to take over customer accounts or devise convincing consumer authorised push payment (APP) scams, often in other channels.
And technology is making the fraudster’s job quicker and easier. AI now enables criminals to launch automated (often undetected) attacks on contact centre IVR systems on a huge scale, the majority of which are complete within an average of 95 seconds. That level of ‘under the radar’ access to customer data makes contact centres a prime target for the scammers and fraudsters responsible for SABRIC’s sobering statistics.
Fraudsters leave a trail
When fraudsters call the bank, for whatever reason, they leave a trail that the bank’s fraud teams can pick up. Their phone numbers can often be linked to multiple customer accounts, and are often seen targeting multiple organisations and sectors at the same time. Smartnumbers Annual Fraud Review 2025 found that 68% of the fraud cases flagged by our platform affected more than one company. Our clients have achieved great success when working together to disrupt all kinds of fraud.
South African bereavement fraud rings spotted and mule gangs disrupted
One leading UK bank using Smartnumbers to disrupt financial crime activity discovered a trail that led them to a fraud ring based in South Africa, for example. By sharing between the different fraud teams lists of phone numbers and intelligence linked to suspicious activity in the contact centre, the bank’s bereaved customer team uncovered multilple false claim applications originating in South Africa.
Meanwhile, another global bank using Smartnumbers has been able to prevent millions in fraud losses by spotting mule-related activity. By logging all the numbers and voices associated with already known mule accounts and account holders, any new accounts being set up or calls about existing accounts that match can be flagged. Significant mule rings operating across several banks have been uncovered this way: one Smartnumbers fraud referral led the bank to discover multiple additional fraudsters and mule accounts. A large number of these were stopped before any transactions were made, preventing substantial losses.
In a world where fraudsters operate globally across organisations at this scale and speed, our best defence is to collaborate better and faster than they do. Finding innovative, easy and secure ways to spot and share suspicious activity is key.
