As part of efforts to protect its customers from cyber-crime and the activities of fraudsters, the United Bank for Africa Plc (UBA) Monday launched its Security Operation Centre.
The bank said the security centre that was established at its head office in Lagos, would enable it monitor all electronic banking activities in Nigeria and the 18 African countries where it has subsidiaries.
The facility would also monitor the state of anti-virus of the bank’s systems in order to ensure effectiveness of their operations.
Speaking during the launch of the facility in Lagos, the Group Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, UBA, Mr. Philips Oduoza, said the facility gave the bank the ability to see real-time live transactions and be able to block attacks.
The UBA boss said: “When you are sleeping at night and you are thinking of open channels, you don’t sleep very well. We need to thank the Central Bank Governor for helping us migrate transactions from banking halls to electronic platforms.
“That is what had led to this because when you have electronic channels, you have a whole lot of transactions and you will find out that fraud will continue to be there and people are going to continue to make attempts. Gradually, you are going to see the fraud shifting from physical to electronic, which is where the battle is.”
Uduoza, who argued that cyber-attack would be the next wave of challenge that banks would have to face, however assured customers that the board and management of the bank takes security as a top priority item and had so much invested on that.
“Any serious organisation that does not focus on security is actually going to be a thing of regret for them. Therefore, what we did was to partner with a world class institution in order to develop this security operation centre that has capability of protecting us in Nigeria and 18 other African countries where we operate and you can see the transactions on real-time.
“In fact, if you recall, recently we put up an advert where we told people not disclose their particulars to anybody at all. Indeed, UBA will never ask you for your password and no staff of UBA can do that. If anybody is requesting for your password, just ignore the person. That was what we were trying to communicate when we put out the adverts recently,” he added.
Earlier, in his presentation, the Group Head, IT Risk Management, UBA, Mr. Sam Okenye, who said the centre would be open 24 hours every day, listed insider and outsider collaboration, cyber-crime ring infiltrate organisations, theft of intellectual property, theft of confidential information, phishing attack, identity theft, card fraud, internet banking fraud, amongst others, as security threats in the industry.
Facebook Comments