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Panashe Chikonyora

FINANCIAL services provider, Central Africa Building Society (CABS), has upgraded its mobile banking application system to guarantee improved security for its clients in the wake of an increase in cybercrimes.

The upgrade comes with new features that will give customers a smarter and more refreshed look and a faster and more reliable product.

The upgrade follows CABS’ enhancement of its mobile banking application on Android and IOS in November last year.

This allowed customers to do zip-it, internal transfers, balance enquiries, mini statement requests, buy airtime and ZESA tokens.

The improvement will allow CABS account holders to pay bills, school fees, change PIN numbers and view multiple accounts under one mobile application.

With the new added features on to the application, customers will now be able to register themselves and sign up to use the mobile application without physically visiting the bank.

The upgrade also enables biometric login for customers who use handsets with fingerprint and face recognition as well as blocking and un-blocking of their cards to combat card cloning.

In an interview with The Herald Finance and Business, CABS deputy managing director, Mr Mehluli Mpofu, disclosed that it is CABS’ duty to prioritise the security of its customers in this digital world.

“As we move into the digital era, the security of our user’s data becomes more and more critical.

In line with that, CABS has enhanced the security of the mobile application using different technologies.

“The best cryptography tools and techniques have been used to encrypt all user data (PIN numbers and user details) to ensure no one is able to decrypt the details once they have been transmitted.

“High level identification, authentication and authorisation measures have been put in place as well as tamper detection technologies that detect when your phone is being hacked and triggers the necessary prevention methods.

“Another technology used is the Principle of Least Privilege which monitors proper and strict access management of the app and interacting systems to ensure these only access information they need,” he stated.

Mr Mpofu assured reliability of the application saying it is continuously tested to verify that it is working as per design specification.

“CABS has set policies and standards to manage the application and servers for backups, patching, redundancy and DR in a PCI-DSS compliant environment.

“To top it all, CABS continuously invests in user education and awareness campaigns on how to protect devices, PIN numbers and personal data,” he added.

Meanwhile, Mr Mpofu said CABS is working with mobile network providers on a solution that will allow customers to use the application free of data, as its way to counter expense challenges that are pushing data bundle prices away from the reach of many, whose wages have not risen proportionately with the prices of goods and services.

However, CABS encourages users in areas with limited data connectivity to use the USSD using the short code *227# saying it is good in preventing network failures.

As part of its financial inclusion efforts  — CABS revealed that it has card based products which include Textacash — a low KYC account which has no monthly fees, where customers are only charged per transaction.