Global payments technology company Mastercard is deploying artificial intelligence (AI) and tokenization technologies to strengthen security across Ethiopia’s rapidly expanding digital financial ecosystem.
As Ethiopia expands digital payments beyond cash-based transactions to include virtual cards, mobile wallets and contactless point-of-sale systems, rising transaction volumes are increasing the need for stronger cybersecurity safeguards.
Addressing these vulnerabilities is seen as essential to ensuring that efforts to expand financial inclusion remain resilient against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
Ethiopia’s digital payment transformation is taking place alongside broader policy and regulatory reforms. The government has pursued measures to reduce reliance on cash and improve interoperability among banks, fintech companies and mobile money operators.
However, security concerns have intensified alongside the sector’s growth. The National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) reported that fraud losses reached 1.3 billion birr in 2024, while attempted cyberattacks targeting government and private organisations increased by 115 per cent in the first half of that year compared with the same period in 2023.
Speaking to Capital, Shabir Ahmed, Mastercard’s Senior Vice President and Customer Solutions Center Lead for Africa, said secure payment platforms are essential to sustaining digital adoption in emerging markets.
“Every single payment requires absolute trust,” Ahmed said. “At Mastercard, we have made substantial investments in our cyber and fraud mitigation capabilities globally. Today, we harness real-time artificial intelligence to evaluate transactions instantaneously.”
He said the company’s systems assess risk factors within milliseconds to determine whether a transaction is legitimate or fraudulent, protecting consumers while enabling seamless commerce.
Mastercard’s AI capabilities have continued to evolve. In March 2026, the company unveiled a transaction-specific foundation model, a large tabular model trained on hundreds of millions of anonymised transactions.
The model is designed to identify fraudulent activity more accurately than traditional machine-learning systems by detecting complex relationships across large datasets that human analysts might overlook.
It also aims to reduce false positives, which can result in legitimate transactions, including high-value purchases, being incorrectly flagged as suspicious.
The technology marks a shift from conventional approaches that rely heavily on manually engineered features towards more advanced pattern recognition, helping payment providers respond to increasingly sophisticated fraud schemes.
Beyond AI-powered risk assessment, Mastercard is advancing tokenization technology to protect sensitive payment information.
Tokenization replaces a cardholder’s actual 16-digit Primary Account Number (PAN) with a digitally generated token that can be used for transactions without exposing the underlying card details.
These tokens allow payment credentials to be stored and used across mobile devices, merchant systems and e-commerce platforms while reducing exposure of sensitive account information.
If a merchant’s database is compromised, tokenized payment data can provide an additional layer of protection because tokens are generally restricted to specific devices, merchants or transaction contexts.
This can reduce the risk of card-not-present fraud and the misuse of stolen payment credentials, although the level of protection depends on how the tokenization system is implemented.
The benefits of tokenization have been documented in international markets. Industry discussions citing Visa data indicate that tokenized transactions can reduce e-commerce fraud rates compared with transactions using conventional card numbers.
For Ethiopia, where digital payment adoption is expanding alongside concerns about fraud and consumer confidence, stronger payment security could play an important role in encouraging wider use of electronic transactions.
The technology also supports Mastercard’s local partnerships, including its collaboration with Dashen Bank and Ethiopian Airlines.
Recent co-branded offerings, including ShebaMiles Premium Cards, combine travel-related rewards with international payment capabilities across more than 200 countries and territories.
As cross-border payments and digital services become more accessible, ensuring that transactions remain secure will become increasingly important for banks, merchants and payment service providers.
Tokenization also underpins several consumer-facing payment services. It enables secure tap-to-pay transactions, supports digital wallets such as Google Pay where the service is available, and helps protect credentials used for recurring payments and international subscriptions.
“When I travel today, I no longer rely on a physical card; wherever a contactless point-of-sale terminal is available, I simply tap my mobile phone,” Ahmed told Capital.
“Through tokenization, you do not expose the physical card number—you use a secure tokenized identifier. That is how we simplify the user experience while strengthening the entire payment environment against fraud.”
