While South African consumers are set to spend less this year, increased digitisation and mobile use will leave many open to online fraud, scams and cyberattacks.
Fatima Kota, Category Head Point-of-Sale at Rectron looked at potential opportunities and the risks associated with more cloud-based integrated retail technology.
Global mobile point-of-sale (POS) transaction sales are expected to reach US$10,85 trillion in 2024, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 16,7% to $23,5tn by 2029.
With Africa’s rural population shooting up from over an estimated 532 million at the turn of the millennium to 802m (out of 1,46bn) in 2023, infrastructure and logistics remain a unique challenge.
Mobile dominance
With most Africans living across great distances, the market will be highly dependent on smart mobile POS services that can live on people’s smart phones.
With much of the continent struggling with electricity and fixed line constraints, mobile solar-powered systems with be more relevant here than in the West. Vendors can integrate their accounts with easy-to-use affordable mobile sales platforms more closely linked to inventory and stock management applications (eventually drawing data from supplier databases).
Cloud proliferation
With a variety of cloud-based tools (like POS as a service), even informal businesses will gain access to affordable secure cashless payment systems.
Through wireless networks and local agents, financial services can reach the banked and unbanked alike, providing real-time data of consumers.
Smart integration for the future
The South African Government has recently committed to prioritising the digitisation and digitalisation of its services to improve accessibility and scalability.
These e-government services, aim to digitise most administrative business processes in the public sector, facilitating smoother operations and reduced downtime.
This goes to the heart of the country’s Digital Economy Mission Plan (DEMP) and its primary objective - to promote digital transformation in all sectors.
With the decline of manual record keeping and the increased comfort with digital money, retailers will be able to make faster targeted business decisions.
Business strategy will no longer be speculative but be based on smart analysis of a continuously growing data store.
Not only will traders be able to more accurately monitor and analyse key signals to meet seasonal demand, but they are beginning to deliver even more personalised offerings to each customer through predictive models.
Threat management over the festive season:
With the festive season already in full swing, businesses should be extra vigilant to protect their data, shopper accounts and overall system integrity wherever their customers may be located on the continent, especially when making cross border payments (tourists, importers, remittances, etc).
Consumers should increasingly be encouraged to use contactless payment methods, not to use public wi-fi to transact and to be sceptical of phishing scams via fraudulent websites and emails on offers.
Businesses’ need to ensure their POS systems comply with payment card industry data security standards, ensuring secure handling of cardholder information through data encryption.
Both businesses and customers should regularly check their devices for tampering and transactions should be regularly reviewed to spot anomalies and respond early to limit impact.
Businesses must invest in secure POS services, implement robust access control and ensure continued staff training, especially with new systems like self-checkout (RFID enabled).
Even as modern POS systems integrate real-time fraud detection that flags suspicious or high-risk transactions for review, businesses need to ensure POS software is always up to date to limit unauthorised access risk.
Cyber security and cyber hygiene is a moving target – software and security updates are vital to overall system health, because they often include critical patches to security holes.
Keep your software updated with the latest version available, and not just operating system updates, but firmware updates from the device manufacturer as well.
Cyber security and data protection affects everyone, from large organizations to all citizens who own or use a computer connected to the internet.
As retailers adopt more advanced POS printers, scanners, mobile devices and an array of modern POS solutions, they need to ensure that cyber security is top of mind for sustained growth and protection of customers, especially during peak shopping seasons.
BUSINESS REPORT