Mastercard is partnering with the Mojaloop Foundation and AfricaNenda to bring AI fraud detection — and, more significantly, dispute resolution — to Africa’s account-to-account payment systems.
Africa now runs 36 live instant payment systems across 31 countries, processing more than 64 billion transactions worth nearly $2 trillion in 2024.
The gap being targeted
Card payments can be disputed and reversed. Account-to-account transfers generally cannot.
When a consumer is scammed into pushing money from their bank account to someone else’s, there is typically no chargeback mechanism, no standardised dispute process and no route to recovery. The transaction was authorised, and it is final.
That is the structural problem Mastercard is proposing to address, by bringing card-style consumer protections into direct bank-to-bank transfers.
What A2A Protect does
The software applies AI to three functions:
- Real-time risk scoring on transactions
- Tracking of “mule” accounts used to move stolen money
- Formal dispute-resolution mechanisms
Mule account detection is the technically interesting part. Stolen funds are usually moved through a chain of intermediary accounts within minutes, and identifying that pattern requires visibility across institutions rather than within one.
Mastercard says it will explore integrating A2A Protect directly into Mojaloop’s core infrastructure — the open-source software used by central banks and regional payment switches. Nothing has yet been committed.
The separate AfricaNenda arrangement is advisory: Mastercard will provide technical guidance to regional regulators and policymakers on setting up secure, interoperable payment systems. AfricaNenda’s stated goal is bringing more than 400 million financially excluded adults into digital payments by 2030.
The fraud figure
Mastercard puts the exposure at roughly 15% of African adults encountering scams daily.
That is the company’s figure, and no methodology accompanies it. Daily encounter is a strong claim, and the number is best read as Mastercard’s own rather than an established measure.
Commercial tools in open-source infrastructure
The partnership raises a question the announcement touches only lightly.
Tazama is an open-source real-time fraud detection platform already operating in this ecosystem, evaluated by organisations including BankservAfrica, with early adopters across West Africa and COMESA.
Mojaloop chief executive Jean Bosco Iyacu framed Mastercard’s tools as additive — advanced fraud detection alongside existing open-source frameworks such as Tazama, helping drive adoption in underbanked communities where mistrust of digital channels persists.
Whether a commercial layer inside open-source payment infrastructure remains complementary over time is a reasonable thing to watch. Mojaloop exists partly so central banks can run instant payments without depending on commercial card networks.
“Trust is the foundation of every successful digital economy,” said Johan Gerber, Mastercard’s executive vice president of payment networks. “As account-to-account payments accelerate across Africa, consumers and businesses need the confidence that their money is protected and supported when something goes wrong.”
