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As digital payments continue to grow across Africa, fraud prevention startup Orca Fraud is taking an Africa-first approach to tackling increasingly sophisticated financial scams that can move across multiple payment channels before conventional systems detect them.
Founded in 2024 by Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby, the Cape Town-based company is developing fraud-monitoring infrastructure designed specifically around the way payments work in African and other emerging markets.
The founders, who previously worked at fintech company Stitch, identified a gap in conventional fraud technology: many existing systems were developed for Western financial markets and were not designed to handle Africa’s fragmented, mobile-first payment environment.
Building Fraud Detection Around African Payment Behaviour
Africa’s payment landscape differs significantly from more mature financial markets. Mobile wallets, agent banking, instant transfers and other alternative payment methods operate alongside conventional bank and card infrastructure.
That diversity creates a challenge for fraud teams because a single fraudulent scheme can involve several payment rails.
Orca’s platform is designed to monitor transactions in real time, allowing financial institutions and payment providers to assess activity while money is moving rather than relying solely on investigations after a transaction has been completed.
The company says its technology combines transaction monitoring, machine learning and fraud intelligence to identify suspicious behaviour and support faster risk decisions.
Rather than applying a single model across every market, Orca develops customised models based on individual payment methods and clients because fraudulent behaviour varies from one market and payment ecosystem to another.
Fragmented Data Presents a Major Challenge
One of Orca’s central arguments is that African payment data cannot simply be treated in the same way as datasets from more developed markets.
Payment information is spread across different rails and providers, while transaction behaviour can be heavily influenced by local economic conditions and informal financial activity.
This makes it difficult for generic fraud systems trained predominantly on Western transaction data to accurately distinguish legitimate African payment behaviour from fraudulent activity.
Orca has therefore focused on aggregating payment intelligence from African markets and using it to train machine-learning models that reflect local transaction patterns.
The company says this approach creates a network effect across markets. Fraud patterns identified in one country can provide intelligence that helps identify similar behaviour elsewhere.
For example, activity detected in Nigeria can improve detection in Kenya, while emerging fraud patterns in South Africa can provide useful signals for systems operating in Ghana.
Fraud Prevention Must Keep Pace With Financial Inclusion
The growth of mobile money and digital financial services has brought millions of people into formal and digital payment ecosystems, but it has also expanded the potential attack surface for fraudsters.
Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for more than half of the world’s mobile money accounts and processed about 74% of global mobile money transactions in 2024, according to data cited in reporting on Orca.
Common threats in the region include account takeovers, SIM-swap attacks and social-engineering scams, with criminals increasingly exploiting weaknesses across interconnected payment systems.
The challenge is particularly significant because financial institutions must prevent fraudulent transactions without unnecessarily blocking legitimate customers.
A fraud system that produces too many false alerts can create friction for users and potentially undermine the convenience that has helped digital payments expand in the first place.
Orca’s model is therefore built around making risk decisions during the transaction process while maintaining approval rates for legitimate payments.
Startup Expands Beyond Africa
Although its roots are in African payments, Orca is increasingly extending its technology to other emerging markets.
The company says its platform now supports fraud and anti-money-laundering intelligence across more than 75 countries, with transaction monitoring covering payment ecosystems ranging from African mobile wallets to cryptocurrency and other digital payment platforms internationally.
In March 2026, Orca raised $2.35 million in seed funding in a round led by Norrsken22, with participation from OneDayYes, Enza Capital and CV VC Africa.
At the time, the company said it was processing more than $5 billion in monthly transaction volume across more than 70 countries, working with banks, telecommunications companies and payment providers.
The funding is expected to support the expansion of Orca’s real-time transaction monitoring and fraud intelligence infrastructure across Africa and other emerging markets.
Making Fraud Intelligence a Shared Defence
Orca’s strategy also extends beyond individual institutions.
The company has developed Friends in Fraud, a professional community intended to connect fraud and compliance professionals across banks, fintechs and telecommunications companies.
The initiative allows participants to exchange information on emerging fraud patterns, behavioural signals and new threats, creating a broader intelligence network around digital financial services.
The approach reflects the increasingly interconnected nature of financial crime, where a fraudulent operation can exploit weaknesses across several institutions and payment channels rather than targeting a single provider.
As African digital finance continues to scale, the battle over fraud prevention is becoming as important as the race to make payments faster and more accessible.
For Orca, the strategy is to build security into payment infrastructure from the beginning rather than treating fraud prevention as an additional layer added after financial products have been developed.
The company’s expansion suggests that the technology designed around Africa’s complex payment environment could ultimately become relevant far beyond the continent as emerging markets face similar challenges around mobile-first finance, fragmented payment rails and increasingly sophisticated fraud.
