MTN is the largest telecommunications
company in Africa,
with more than 272 million
mobile subscribers.
The Covid-19 pandemic seriously impacted
the way we did business in general.
We found that the number
of transactions that were coming
through online channels increased drastically.
In South Africa in 2021,
the industry saw a 41.5% increase
in overall fraudulent transactions.
This impacted us just as it impacted
every other business in South Africa.
And this has created awareness
within these organisations
to improve their technologies
and the architectures.
With the fraud stats increasing
as rapidly as they were,
we needed to do something quite quickly.
We needed a technology
that would allow us to be agile,
to allow us to change at the speeds
the fraudsters are changing as well.
MTN being a very innovative company,
identified these early potential
roadblocks or hampers in their security
and processes and decided
to optimise their processes
by adopting the Microsoft Power Platform.
Power Platform
is an easy to use low-code based solution
which enables new team members
easily to create fraud and detection solutions.
So the Power Platforms have allowed us
to connect with our internal stakeholders,
with our live dashboards
and automated reporting.
And effectively what we did is
we started testing the capabilities
with different revenue streams.
Having in mind that Microsoft is a
cloud based solution, it was very easy
to bring all the processes
into one centralised location.
This led to easy and seamless integration
of all the business processes
and third party systems.
So MTN initially adopted Microsoft's
trial licenses to test out their
their action plan,
and it was very, very successful.
And based on the success, they opted to
then procure the full user licenses,
which allowed them to stop
the daily threats that are happening
and constantly innovate
to adapt to the changing environment.
The zero plus model requires that
every transaction needs to be verified.
So this assumes that even transactions
behind a corporate
firewall needs to be verified
before the transaction can occur.
And based on this architecture, Microsoft
has developed this zero based
trust model and allowed it to flow
throughout its applications,
running across Office 365,
Microsoft Dynamics and the Power Platform.
The Power Platforms have allowed us
to increase our ability
to protect our customers
and save the business money.
We have increased in a six month period
our prevented losses by 39%.
We have automated 60%
of our fraud verifications
and 40% of our manual verifications
have been automated.
This allows us to be risk
based in our approach.
Digitisation with the Microsoft
platform enables bringing
all the scattered information
around different social platforms,
onto one centralised place and enabling to create
much easier fraud and detection system.
With the incredible success of this project,
we are now looking at automating
all our processes with the use of Power Automate.
Everything from the way the analysts
operate their day-to-day activities,
all the way to the management
reporting and month-end closures.
Microsoft's solution,
having all the information in one
centralised place is very easy to use
and agile,
so the team can work together
and collaborate together much easier .
For me, what was amazing is that the Fraud
Division did this all on their own.
They started off with the trial licenses
adopted the technology
and applied it in their environment,
which gave them all the opportunities
to reduce the risk.
I love using Microsoft Technologies
for anti-fraud initiatives.
It allows us to add value,
protect our customers.
and shine.
We're now planning many hackathons
with Microsoft to see how we can
incorporate Power Apps and Power Automate
into other aspects of how we operate.
The team, myself
and the management included,
are truly excited for how
this can automate the way we do business.