The real festive season surge? Cyber risk, not sales
Every year, the season of Black Friday and discounted deals exposes the same uncomfortable truth about digital commerce in South Africa: as online consumer activity surges, so the cracks in our cybersecurity measures become more apparent. For businesses that transact or offer rewards digitally, the risk is no longer theoretical or seasonal. It is structural, persistent, and accelerating fast.
South Africa has become a high-value target. According to Surfshark, the country averaged one leaked account every minute in Q2:2025. And our Information Regulator recorded nearly 2,000 data breaches between April and July 2025 alone – a 40% jump over the previous reporting period. Globally, compromised consumer credentials rank among one of the most common initial attack vectors, yet the cost – financial, reputational, and regulatory – lands squarely on the businesses that those users interact with.
This is the heart of the problem: our digital systems assume that users will behave securely. But they will not, and the modern threat environment ensures they do not have to for criminals to succeed. Most platforms are still built on an outdated premise: that passwords, reused credentials, static KYC checks, one-time pins, and basic device assumptions are ‘good enough’.
The truth? They are not.
When your cybersecurity strategy depends on users doing the right thing, you’re outsourcing your first line of defence to your least predictable stakeholder. This is a business risk no executive can justify.
The real pain-points
Cybercriminals are not chasing individual consumers. They are targeting the digital ecosystems consumers trust: your loyalty programme, your rewards engine, your e-commerce checkout, your subscription model. And they often succeed because the underlying authentication systems were built for a pre-AI, pre-deepfake world.
The fallout is familiar across every sector:
Surging account takeovers.
Synthetic identities slipping through weak verification.
Exploding support costs.
POPIA non-compliance and regulatory investigations.
Erosion of customer trust that can take years to rebuild.
And yet, digital adoption continues to accelerate. Over the next three years, Synapser estimates that digital rewards and loyalty will become the frontline of customer retention across retail, banking, telecoms, and gaming. The businesses that win will be the ones whose customers know – not hope – will keep their personal data and accounts are secure.
The strategic trilemma keeping leaders awake at night
As organisations deepen their digital strategies, three pressures collide:
How do we onboard and acquire users at scale without becoming a fraud magnet?
How do we satisfy tightening regulatory requirements without creating friction that kills conversions?
How do we deliver seamless customer experiences while knowing that every account belongs to a real, unique human?
Most legacy systems force an impossible trade-off between security, compliance, and user experience. Fragmented identity checks, document uploads, and SMS OTPs create friction for real users while leaving gaping holes for criminals.
This is where the digital economy is shifting towards identity-first verification, where trust is determined by the platform, not the user. This philosophy underpins Synapser’s approach across our technologies, including Gain For Me, our consumer app where verified users watch short, targeted advertisements, answer content-related questions, and are rewarded instantly for genuine engagement.
Our system does not rely on passwords, vigilance, or user awareness. Entry is Synapser’s flagship product: a mobile device-based, multi-factor authentication (MFA) system that secures your digital identity and gives you total control over your private data. Instead, it confirms in real time that the person interacting with a platform is a live, present, unique human being.
Verification completes in seconds, and because the cryptographic keys generated for each session are single-use and never stored, the attack vectors behind account takeovers collapse.
Crucially, this works even on lower-end smartphones, because security cannot be a privilege reserved for premium devices. For South African realities, inclusivity is part of integrity.
The result is a fundamental shift in how digital trust is created. Security becomes autonomous. Protection becomes platform-driven. Risk becomes controllable. And this is where the opportunity lies.
The path forward for enterprises
Identity assurance must become the foundation on which frictionless onboarding, regulatory compliance, and trustworthy digital rewards can scale. And when security becomes this intelligent, this automated, and this inclusive, it stops being a cost centre and instead becomes a growth engine.
But the solution is not to build another bolt-on security feature. It is to partner with cybersecurity innovators who have demonstrated results across South Africa and beyond its borders, and whose identity-first architecture can be integrated into your broader digital ecosystem.
Every year, Black Friday reminds us that digital volume is both an opportunity and a threat. But the answer is not to slow down engagement. It is to harden the systems that enable it. Because the next surge is coming. The only question is whether it lifts your business… or exposes it.