{"id":642154,"date":"2026-04-24T08:59:59","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T06:59:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=642154"},"modified":"2026-04-28T09:31:29","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T07:31:29","slug":"two-south-african-women-developed-software-that-stops-r82-billion-in-fraud-a-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/security\/642154-two-south-african-women-developed-software-that-stops-r82-billion-in-fraud-a-month.html","title":{"rendered":"Two South African women developed software that protects R82 billion from fraud in a month"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby met over a decade ago at the University of Cape Town, where they studied engineering before founding Cape Town anti-fraud startup Orca Fraud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like its marine hunter namesake, Orca’s real-time transaction monitoring uses a coordinated, “always-learning” approach to detect and stop fraud as soon as it occurs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In March, the company raised R38.5 million in seed funding<\/a> to expand its real-time transaction monitoring service, its primary product, and fraud intelligence across Africa and Latin America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During their time as software engineers at Cape Town-based fintech Stitch, Pillay and Wilby saw that the rapid growth of financial technology across Africa was accompanied by growing fraud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What we saw was with all that growth, and more digital financial inclusion, we were also seeing more fraud,” Pillay said in a recent interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The main problem we saw was that fraud in Africa was different. This is due to two reasons, the first being different payment methods, and then very different socio-economic climates.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pillay gave the example of Safaricom’s fintech darling M-Pesa, and how its enormous growth was not accompanied by a rapid growth in fraud compliance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She has a background in robotics engineering and earned her degree cum laude<\/em>. Before university, she received nine distinctions from St Mary’s Diocesan School for Girls in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We just started seeing a lot of real-time fraud on alternative payment methods,” she told MyBroadband.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“When we looked at different solutions on the market, we found that a lot of them didn’t fit the South African payment ecosystem.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pair started Orca Fraud in January 2024, with Pillay serving as the chief executive officer and Wilby as the chief technology officer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wilby has a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering (honours) and has a background in education technology, having founded e-learning platform Zomila in 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Protecting companies in over 70 countries from fraudulent transactions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
The team at Orca Fraud<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Wilby explained that the software uses “a combination of proprietary algorithms, heuristics, and machine learning” to determine the likelihood that a transaction is fraudulent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We are then able to return that to the provider, who is then able to make a decision on whether or not to proceed,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time of publication, the company protected over R82 billion in monthly transactions from fraud across more than 70 countries, working with banks, telcos, and payment providers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Orca Fraud announced a partnership with Ozow, one of South Africa’s biggest payment providers by volume, late last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ozow stated that it controlled over 70% of South Africa’s instant, third-party electronic payments as of November 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“This partnership represents a shared commitment to building a safer, frictionless payments ecosystem where merchants and customers can transact with confidence,” it said in a LinkedIn post<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Orca’s latest funding round was led by tech growth fund Norrsken22, a returning investor, with OneDayYes, Enza Capital and CV VC Africa joining the round.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Since our initial investment, Orca has evolved into critical infrastructure that enterprises increasingly rely on to manage fraud in high-velocity payment systems,” said Nivesh Pather, principal at Norrsken22.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“As digital payments accelerate and fraud becomes more organised and technology-driven, institutions need intelligence embedded directly into transaction flows to protect customers without slowing payments.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company now has a small team, with Pillay saying this was by design to keep it “tight, technical, and deeply embedded with clients.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She said that as they scale across emerging markets and payment systems, their focus remained on ensuring safety keeps pace with scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last month, Orca announced a partnership<\/a> with African business-to-business-focused fintech Cauridor. The company operates cross-border payments between Africa and Canada and the United States. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pillay said that the partnership allowed them to build models that can learn from the dynamically changing, context-specific payment channels and the fraud patterns that emerge from them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“To build models that actually work in these environments, you need to learn from real transaction data where that fraud is happening,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Partners like Cauridor give Orca diverse, multi-corridor signals across African and American money flows, sharpening its interpretation of behaviour and protection of payments in emerging markets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Orca Fraud’s dashboard<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n

Photos of Pillay and Wilby<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby started Orca Fraud in 2024. The company processes over R82 billion per month through its anti-fraud system. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341213,"featured_media":642155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[104707,104710,39268,165,22845,104708,104709,104687,67844,104686,1301],"class_list":["post-642154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-carla-wilby","tag-cauridor","tag-fintech","tag-fraud","tag-machine-learning","tag-nivesh-pather","tag-norssken22","tag-orca-fraud","tag-ozow","tag-thalia-pillay","tag-university-of-cape-town"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642154"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642154"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":643821,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642154\/revisions\/643821"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/642155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}