In a single 12-month period, Africa lost an estimated $57.8 billion to scams and cyber fraud, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) 2025 Report. That is not a typo. Billion, with a B.
The same report found that 68% of African adults reported experiencing a scam in 2025. In South Africa alone, digital banking fraud surged by 86% in the last year, driven by AI‑powered social engineering attacks targeting mobile banking apps and peer‑to‑peer transfers.
The response from regulators has been swift and severe. As of 1 June 2025, South Africa’s Joint Standard 2 of 2024 holds bank boards of directors personally and legally responsible for establishing “cyber resilience.” Cybersecurity is no longer an IT problem. It is a governance and liability problem.
That is the backdrop against which this year’s expanded Finance Transformation Africa summit will convene on 30 September to 1 October at The Maslow Hotel in Sandton.
For the first time, a single delegate pass grants access to one flagship summit and four co‑located streams: Wealth Transformation Africa, Insurance Transformation Africa, the Future of Payments Summit, and Lending Transformation Africa. According to the organisers the event is described as “the pan-African platform uniting banking, insurance, payments, lending, and wealth leaders to accelerate the continent’s financial evolution”
Fraud and security across the agenda
Past Banking Transformation Africa events have consistently highlighted that security must be central to digital transformation – a warning underscored at the 2024 gathering by a Nedbank executive who said “security should be central in banks’ digital transformation efforts to safeguard against evolving cyber threats.” The 2026 agenda reflects that imperative across multiple streams. The Insurance Transformation Africa stream covers fraud mitigation and predictive analytics, while the Future of Payments stream addresses fraud, cybersecurity and real-time risk decisioning. The Lending Transformation Africa stream tackles credit risk through recovery, collections and risk analytics, and the main Finance Transformation Africa stage adds broader sessions on cybersecurity, financial crime, digital identity, KYC and cross-border fraud prevention. The Wealth Transformation Africa stream, while not featuring a dedicated fraud track, focuses instead on digital wealth management in an inflationary environment, AI-driven portfolio advice, ESG and green investing, and cross-border wealth structuring.
Beyond defence: AI as an offensive weapon
Past Banking Transformation Africa events have also documented the growing consensus that AI and data are offensive weapons in the same fight. The 2025 gathering recorded a speaker noting that “data is the foundation… without data, even cloud and AI won’t deliver their full potential”
The organiser makes the same point: “While others are still talking about what AI might do, this summit delivers the ‘how’. Learn how to leverage data to anticipate customer needs, automate risk assessment, and drive operational efficiency that actually hits the bottom line”
That means moving beyond segmentation to hyper‑personalisation, beyond rule‑based fraud scoring to predictive intelligence, and beyond siloed systems to open, cloud‑native architectures. A key takeaway from the 2025 Banking Transformation Africa event was that “the biggest risk for banks is their inability to reimagine themselves quickly enough, not disruption from external forces”
An attendee at a previous Banking Transformation Africa summit summed up the stakes: “The summit underscored the critical role of security and trust in this new era of financial services. As the industry moves towards more open and integrated ecosystems, maintaining the highest standards of security will be essential in building and preserving customer trust”
With $57.8 billion in losses, an 86% surge in digital banking fraud, and boards now personally liable for cyber resilience, that trust has never been harder to earn – or more expensive to lose.
For more information or to register, visit: https://financetransformationafrica.com
