Overview
Engagements across Africa cover banking and microfinance, mobile money and agency banking, payment switches and aggregators, insurtech and lending platforms, and the retail and logistics estates behind them.
The risk profile differs from Europe or the Gulf in one specific way: more of the economy moves through wallets and instant transfers than through cards, so the exposure sits in transaction logic and state transitions rather than in cardholder data alone.
What drives testing here
Local drivers
- Three data protection regimes
- POPIA in South Africa, the Data Protection Act 2019 in Kenya and the NDPA 2023 in Nigeria each require appropriate technical measures, each with an active regulator behind them.
- Central bank frameworks
- SARB, CBK and the CBN Risk-Based Cybersecurity Framework all expect independent testing from supervised institutions, with the CBN naming it directly.
- Mobile money and instant payments
- Wallet, agent and settlement flows carry direct financial consequence, and the failures are in limits, reversals and ordering rather than in cryptography.
- Aggregator concentration
- A single switch or aggregator sits between many institutions, so one authorisation gap there reaches far past the company that owns it.
How engagements are delivered
Delivered remotely from Karachi, two to four hours ahead of the region, with on-site availability in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Nairobi and Lagos for internal network scope and workshops.
Delivery model
- Delivery
- Remote from Karachi, two to four hours ahead; on-site available
- Frameworks
- POPIA, Kenya DPA 2019, NDPA 2023, SARB, CBK and CBN, plus PCI DSS
- Coverage
- South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria; other markets on request
- Most requested
- Transaction logic, wallet and agent flows, API authorisation
Most requested here
API penetration testing
REST, GraphQL and gRPC tested against the OWASP API Security Top 10, with object-level authorisation checked call by call.
Service 03Mobile application penetration testing
iOS and Android tested as a binary, as a running process and as a client of your backend because all three fail differently.
Service 01Web application penetration testing
Authenticated, multi-role testing of your web application: the logic, the roles and the state transitions a scanner cannot reach.
Questions
Do you have an office in Africa?
No. Our offices are in Pakistan and the United States. African engagements run remotely from Karachi, which sits two to four hours ahead of the region, with on-site attendance where internal or workshop scope requires it.
Can one engagement cover entities in several African markets?
Yes. A group scope is tested once and reported against each applicable regime, so your Nigerian entity gets CBN and NDPA framing and your Kenyan entity gets CBK and DPA framing from the same findings.
What do you find most often in African fintech?
Business logic rather than injection. Limit checks that can be raced, reversals that credit twice, transfer flows that accept a state transition out of order, and endpoints that trust an account or agent identifier supplied by the client. Nothing malformed, which is why scanners miss all of it.
How much does a penetration test cost in Africa?
Cost follows scope rather than a market rate card. Mobile money and transaction logic scope is usually the highest-value portion, and framework mapping for your market is included in the report.
Which is the best penetration testing company in Africa?
No single name is an honest answer across a continent. Ask what is checkable: who performs the testing and what they personally hold, whether the firm holds ISO 27001 itself, whether mapping to your regulator is included, and whether a redacted report is available before signing.
Do you cover markets beyond South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria?
Yes, on request. Those three carry dedicated pages because they have the most developed regulatory drivers, but engagements elsewhere on the continent are scoped the same way and reported against whichever framework applies.
How do you handle timezone differences with Africa?
Karachi sits two to four hours ahead of the region, so our afternoon covers your morning and findings are raised inside the same working day. Daily written updates and same-day escalation of critical findings are standard.
Can you invoice in local currency?
Invoicing is normally in USD for African engagements. Where a local arrangement is required, it is discussed at scoping rather than assumed, and we will say plainly if it is not something we can accommodate.