Eighteen months ago, one of South Africa’s largest retailers wasn’t worried about AI. Onboarding worked. Compliance checks passed audits. Fraud was a known, managed cost of doing business. Then a syndicate found them. The attack looked ordinary. Customers submitted genuine South African ID documents. Except they weren’t genuine anymore. Using AI, fraudsters had altered key…
The Department of Home Affairs seeks handheld mobile devices for its inspectorate unit. National Treasury’s eTenders Portal experienced problems over the weekend, but determined players within the ICT industry would have discovered a slew of interesting technology requirements from various departments and state-owned entities. Nevertheless, it is a tender from the Department of Home Affairs…
Nearly two-thirds of South African consumers have used artificial intelligence to assist with shopping-related tasks, according to new survey data from Visa that points to a rapid shift in how locals interact with digital payment technologies. The Visa Spending Shift Survey, conducted by Morning Consult among a thousand South African adults in October 2025, found…
SASSA’s digital verification programme has made headway in KwaZulu-Natal. The KwaZulu-Natal regional office of the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) is reviewing over 180 000 social grant cases, as part of the income verification process. This came to light during the Portfolio Committee on Social Development’s week-long oversight of the KZN province, which kicked-off…
Stricter and more widespread use of biometric authentication by mobile operators could help reduce the growing Sim-swap fraud menace in South Africa, according to the Communications Risk Information Centre (Comric). Comric is a shared intelligence hub set up by the big operators, including Vodacom, MTN, Cell C and Liquid Intelligent Technologies, as a joint effort…
The decision by home affairs minister Leon Schreiber to hike the fees companies must pay for live access to the National Population Register database by more than 6 500% “does not make sense”. This is according to Marius Coetzee, CEO of Ideco Biometrics, a company that has helped some of the largest institutions in South Africa,…
Home affairs minister Dr Leon Schreiber and TymeBank co-founder Coenraad Jonker. The home affairs minister and TymeBank’s co-founder are involved in a public squabble over the price of a biometric check increasing from 15c to R10. TymeBank argues that the poor will bear the brunt of the hike, as it cannot afford to absorb the…
