The Philippine telco is testing Nokia's Network Exposure Platform solution to build security-focused applications for the banking sector. This comes amid increasing cyberattacks on Philippine financial services.
Globe Telecom has stepped up its fight against financial fraud by collaborating with Nokia on network APIs to provide enhanced security for its banking and other corporate customers.
The Philippine telco is currently testing Nokia's Network Exposure Platform (NEP) offering, which expands and simplifies the number of APIs available to Globe, its enterprise partners and developers, to build security-focused applications using deep network data.
"With cyberattacks on banking services accelerating, it is crucial that we make available the latest network-powered technologies to our enterprise customers and help them safeguard against fraud," said Joel Agustin, head of service planning and engineering at Globe Telecom, in a statement released last week.
"We are now at the stage of testing how Nokia's NEP can support our customers in the banking and enterprise sectors with security verification tools to prevent fraudulent transactions," he added.
Nokia's NEP solution is based on the GSMA Operator Platform, which is a common platform standard for exposing operator capabilities to developers. Globe is a member of the GSMA Open Gateway Initiative, which provides developers with universal access to operators' network capabilities for the development and delivery of mobile applications and online services.
Nokia said the NEP complements and integrates with its Network as Code platform and developer portal, which aligns with the GSMA Open Gateway aggregator concept and provides a cloud-based platform to connect and monetize service provider networks with application developers.
Online financial fraud continues to grow
Over the past few years, the number of digital frauds perpetrated against the Philippine financial services sector has grown exponentially.
Latest figures released at the end of January by the country's Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) showed that the total number of complaints in 2024 tripled to 10,004 from 3,317 recorded the previous year. Nearly one-third, or 32%, of these complaints last year were classified as online fraud, many of which involved financial transactions.
The CICC also noted that cybercriminals are using local e-wallets as a preferred payment method to commit consumer fraud, such as non-delivery of goods and services. Users of the leading e-wallet, GCash, lost a total of 76.49 million Philippine pesos (US$1.32 million) to consumer fraud, online fraud and phishing in 2024. Users of other financial platforms such as BPI, GoTyme and PayMaya also suffered losses of PHP28.47 million ($490,669), PHP15.38 million ($265,068) and PHP13.99 million ($241,112) respectively last year.
The Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) believes the number of digital scams committed in the Philippines is far higher than official records indicate.
"67% of Filipinos did not report scams to law enforcement," wrote GASA managing director Joriz Abraham in "The State of Scams in the Philippines 2024" report. "This underreporting suggests a lack of confidence in the effectiveness of the authorities, with many Filipinos unsure if AI was used against them."
The report noted that scam victims lost an average of $275 each last year, representing a 3% increase in scam losses since 2023. Additionally, more than half of the respondents surveyed for the report said they encountered more scams in 2024, signaling an upward trend in fraudulent activity.
The Philippine banking regulator, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), is currently drafting new and stricter rules for banks and other financial institutions to follow to protect their customers from fraudulent activities.
The new rules will enforce and give teeth to the Anti-Financial Account Scamming Act, which was passed by the Philippine Congress in July 2024. Among its many provisions, the new law requires financial institutions to implement adequate risk and fraud management systems to ensure that their customers' financial accounts are protected.
This new requirement for banks to strengthen their risk and fraud management systems makes Globe Telecom's move to test network APIs to enhance security for banks a timely one.
The role of network APIs in cybersecurity
Network APIs essentially provide the technology that enables third-party developers to access the network capabilities of telecom operators to build and deliver new enterprise applications at scale. They are widely seen as the key to monetizing 5G services.
ABI Research believes that network APIs present immense revenue opportunities for telecom industry players, especially if they focus on high-value APIs such as Quality of Service (QoS) on Demand, network slicing and security APIs.
"As the most prominent 5G monetization opportunity of the APIs we evaluated, security APIs help enterprises authenticate employee access and secure services provided to businesses and consumers," Dimitris Mavrakis, senior research director at ABI Research, wrote in a blog last September.
"Solutions like IEMI fraud detection, Know Your Customers (KYC), number verification, geofencing, and location APIs will heavily target enterprises. This trend diverges from the historically consumer-focused security API initiatives of the past," he added.
By 2028, ABI Research predicts that network security APIs will have an estimated market value of $5.3 billion.
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