AI fraud threatens Africa fintech inclusion gains, EBC CEO David Barrett warns

Africa’s fintech story is one of the most remarkable in global finance. More than 2.1 billion mobile money accounts now exist across the continent, and in 2024 alone, those accounts processed 108 billion transactions worth $1.68 trillion.

Millions of people who had never held a bank account are now sending money, paying bills, and saving digitally.

But a quiet threat is building underneath that progress, and it has nothing to do with bad regulation or poor infrastructure. It has to do with trust.

“Deepfakes remove warning signs, so trust becomes a core economic input for adoption. If users do not feel safe, they revert to cash or informal channels, which is the opposite of what inclusion efforts are trying to achieve.” — David Barrett, EBC Financial Group, in an interview with Technext

That is the crux of a growing problem for Africa’s fintech sector. Artificial intelligence is now being used to create fake videos, clone voices, and impersonate people in ways that are almost impossible to detect in real time.

When a user cannot tell whether a financial instruction is real or fabricated, the safest thing to do is to stop using digital channels altogether. And that choice, made by enough people, can unwind years of progress.

The scale of the threat is not theoretical.

David Barrett, EBC Financial Group

In February 2026, INTERPOL wrapped up an operation targeting online scam networks across Africa. Authorities recorded 651 arrests, identified 1,247 victims, and linked investigations to more than $45 million in reported losses, alongside the seizure of thousands of devices and the shutdown of malicious infrastructure.

Barrett pointed to South Africa as a case study in how fast the risk can escalate. The country’s instant payment service, PayShap, processed 329 million transactions worth R292.5 billion in FY2025.

“South Africa is also a good example of how faster payments expand the attack surface as volumes rise,” he said. The more transactions a system handles, the more opportunities there are for fraud to slip through.

3 things fintech platforms must do

Barrett’s three-part response to the deepfake problem is practical.

• First, identity checks must be built to withstand synthetic media through liveness detection, device intelligence, and stronger verification at high-risk moments.
• Second, payment controls must be tightened, with velocity limits, behavioural monitoring, and extra checks on first-time recipients.
• Third, fintech platforms must clean up their communications so users know exactly what a real support message looks like and what a scam looks like.

The urgency matters because Africa’s fintech sector is still in the middle of a massive expansion, and the window to build trust correctly is narrow.

Barrett said the core problem is not a lack of smartphones or internet access.

“Mobile access is increasingly there, with 84% of adults in low-income and middle-income countries owning a mobile phone,” he said, citing the World Bank’s Global Findex Database 2025.

The real challenge is getting people to move their cash earnings into digital form and feel confident enough to keep them there.

That means the unglamorous stuff matters more than the flashy stuff. “Distribution still beats features,” Barrett said. “The practical question is whether people can load value and spend it within their normal routines. That usually comes down to agent coverage, merchant acceptance, and interoperability across wallets and banks, not app design.”

Remittance costs are another pressure point. Sub-Saharan Africa received $54 billion in remittances in 2023, with Nigeria accounting for more than $20 billion of that.

Yet the average cost of sending $200 to the region stood at 8.78% in Q1 2025, according to the World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide database, almost three times the 3% target set under the Sustainable Development Goals.

Barrett believes that the fix is structural.

More corridors need to move onto fully digital rails, and FX liquidity needs to flow through supervised access points with proper traceability. He pointed to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s framework for licenced Bureau de Change operators as a model, because it hard-wires settlement through licensed institutions and limits cash payout as a share of sales.

On regulation more broadly, Barrett said the conversation is misframed when it becomes innovation against oversight.

“The balance is less about light-touch versus heavy-touch regulation and more about whether rules are predictable, enforceable, and designed around real risk points,” he said. “Where that is true, innovation can still scale, because the market knows what is permitted and what will trigger intervention.”

Nigeria’s recent moves fit that framing. The CBN has routed more retail FX activity into supervised channels and, from January 2026, tightened cash withdrawal controls to push more transactions into electronic systems. Barrett sees these as steps toward trust, not barriers to growth.

The global fintech capital market is also forcing a sharper focus. KPMG’s Pulse of Fintech report recorded global fintech investment rising to $116 billion in 2025, but deal volume fell to an eight-year low of 4,719 deals. Investors are more selective, and platforms without clean unit economics or governance are finding it harder to raise money.

That selectivity creates its own pressure on Africa’s local champions. Platforms like Flutterwave, Chipper Cash, and Nala are moving fast, but they need infrastructure partners who can help with the unglamorous work.

Barrett said EBC sees its role there as helping with the “plumbing that makes scale durable,” including higher-quality onboarding data, cleaner exception handling, and risk governance that counterparties can audit and rely on.

EBC recently established a regulated presence in South Africa, authorised by the Financial Sector Conduct Authority, as part of its push to build a compliant footprint in the region.

The opportunity is real and well-documented. But so is the fragility. Africa’s fintech sector has brought hundreds of millions of people closer to financial tools that can change their lives. The question now is whether the platforms leading that charge can build the kind of trust that keeps people in the system when AI makes deception easier than ever before.

As Barrett put it, if they cannot, the default is cash. And cash is exactly where the sector started.

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