Fragmented intelligence sharing fuels fraud risk – analyst

By Ebenezer Chike Adjei NJOKU

Limited cross-institutional sharing of fraud intelligence remains a key vulnerability in the rapidly expanding domestic digital financial ecosystem, Samuel Amanor, founder and chief executive of BlueSPACE Financial Cloud, has said.

According to the technology executive, the absence of real-time fraud intelligence sharing among banks,  mobile money operators and other financial technology (FinTech) providers, leaves the country’s financial system exposed to coordinated attacks.

“At the moment, fraud intelligence is not shared across service providers. If an incident occurs on one telco, it can easily migrate to another. The same applies within banking; fraud detected at one institution can quickly surface at others. The challenge is that the intelligence needed to stop these patterns is still held in silos,” he said on the sidelines of the inaugural TrustNET Summit in Accra.

This systemic vulnerability persists despite existing oversight mechanisms managed by the state. The Bank of Ghana (BoG) has increasingly relied on its Online Regulatory and Analytical Surveillance System (ORASS) to track industry trends. While ORASS serves as a robust supervisory tool and a central repository for fraud and defalcation reports from banks and specialised deposit-taking institutions, it functions largely after the fact.

By digitising these submissions, the regulator can track the sophistry and frequency of financial crimes, providing a bird’s-eye view of systemic risks, yet the system remains a reporting bridge rather than a real-time transactional shield.

Complementing this is the National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-GH), operated by the Cyber Security Authority (CSA). Acting as the technical nerve centre, CERT-GH issues rapid-response advisories such as recent alerts on AI-driven social engineering and synthetic identity theft.

While the CSA’s 292 short-code provides a vital link for public reporting, industry experts argue that the next evolution must move beyond post-incident coordination and toward the kind of cross-institutional, automated data-pooling required to stop a fraudster before a single cedi leaves a wallet.

This has become more pertinent as Ghana’s digital payments infrastructure now processes more than eight billion transactions on mobile money alone annually. Active mobile money wallets hit 26.7 million in December 2025, for a population of just under 35 million, placing the country among the world’s most widely adopted mobile money markets.

Despite the scale of activity, the sector lacks a shared registry of compromised identities, suspicious devices or confirmed fraud patterns accessible across institutions in real time. Fraud typologies detected within one bank or telecom network are not automatically visible to others, while a customer identity verified by one provider carries little operational recognition across competing platforms.

Mobile money interoperability was introduced to enable funds to move seamlessly between networks, connecting payment rails across the industry. However, interoperability in payments has not been matched by equivalent coordination in fraud monitoring or compliance intelligence.

The BoG’s 2024 Fraud Report, released in April 2025, recorded a 5 percent rise in total cases to 16,733, while the value at risk increased 13 percent to GH¢99million. Payment Service Providers saw case volumes rise 7 percent and exposure climbing 18 percent to GH¢19million. At the same time, the nature of attacks is becoming more technologically sophisticated, with the Digital Identity Fraud in Africa 2026 study finding that nearly 69 percent of biometric fraud attempts targeting African Fintech platforms are now generated using artificial intelligence.

These include synthetic identities capable of bypassing automated onboarding systems and multi-stage fraud schemes designed to exploit gaps between institutions.

Mr. Amanor said the same structural information gap is also affecting lending decisions. Without cross-institutional visibility of borrowers’ liabilities, lenders often struggle to determine the true debt exposure of applicants at the point of credit assessment.

“Without comprehensive data across institutions, we cannot conduct proper due diligence or accurately assess who is creditworthy,” Mr. Amanor said. He noted that one institution he cited had a non-performing loan ratio nearing 50 percent, a situation he attributed in part to these informational gaps.

Trust issues

To address the issue, BlueSPACE launched TrustNET at the summit, a shared compliance and fraud-intelligence platform designed to operate beneath Ghana’s existing payment infrastructure. The system is the product of a partnership between BlueSPACE, INETCO and Sumsub, a London-headquartered digital identity provider.

The platform is intended to allow financial institutions to share verified digital identities and fraud alerts in real time. Under the model, a customer verified by one participating institution could be recognised across the network without repeating the full know-your-customer process, while fraud signals detected by one operator would become visible to others.

INETCO’s machine-learning engine analyses transactions to build evolving risk profiles for individual users, cards and devices, recalibrating risk assessments after each transaction. Sumsub provides identity verification services, including non-document digital checks designed to complete onboarding in seconds.

TrustNET is targeting adoption among commercial banks and mobile money operators, whose networks collectively underpin much of the country’s digital payments activity.

The initiative comes as Ghana continues to strengthen its anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing controls following assessments by GIABA, the regional body responsible for evaluating compliance frameworks in West Africa.

For Mr. Amanor, the benefits of shared intelligence outweigh competitive concerns.

“This is where the country needs to move next. Then the market will reach new heights,” he said.

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