Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telecom firm, together with Amdocs, has announced the purchase of security software to curb revenue leakages.

In a joint statement, the two firms said Safaricom will utilise its “revenue assurance technology and expertise” to offer “more comprehensive and adaptive revenue safeguards for the entire lifecycle of new services across its business. In a fast-paced industry, Safaricom needs to continuously innovate and create new products and services for our customers, which means modernising our procedures and systems for revenue assurance,” Nicholas Mulila Risk Management Director Safaricom said.

Amdocs is a multinational software provider based in Missouri, US.

In-house Fraudulent Cases

Safaricom has grappled with in-house fraudulent cases in the past which have affected its revenues. For instance, 52 workers were sacked in the year ended March last year for suspicion of fraud. In 2016, the telco fired 36 employees for the same reason.

“With our new robust revenue assurance system from Amdocs, we can set dynamic thresholds and auto-action mechanisms on alerts to avoid revenue leakage for the life-cycle of our new digital services,” Mulila added.

Amdocs’ software utilises machine learning to “detect, correct, prevent and recover revenue and cost leakages.”

Gary Miles Amdocs chief marketing officer stated: “With today’s rapid pace of innovation, service providers like Safaricom are looking for ways to balance the introduction of new digital services in record time and as smoothly as possible while protecting their revenue from unidentified leakage, and ultimately fraud.”

Earlier, Safaricom said the employees sacked in the year ended March 2017 were implicated in corruption, asset misuse, and fraudulent expense claims.

The increase in the number of those implicated was thanks to new strict measures that enabled the firm to discover unidentified sources of revenue leakage.

Other than the aforementioned crimes, the sacked employees also breached company policy through unauthorised access to data systems, they were engaged in fraudulent SIM card swapping, and they violated the rules guiding M-Pesa start key issuance.

In November 2017, the National Treasury cautioned that the collapse of the M-Pesa service could greatly disrupt the Kenyan economy. Fortunately, the company has a mobile money investigation unit, established in 2014, which comprises of police officers.