COVER STORY is a breach, in case there is a security problem? Some of the interventions that are being promoted in Rwanda and I believe this is across East Africa and other regions as well is
QUESTION: Tell us briefly about yourself and how you became a leader in IT? Muhizi: My name is Innocent Bagamba Muhizi. I am Rwandan by nationality, I have been in the IT Industry for now over 14 years. Started off in the Public Sector then went to the Private Sector. Starting from being an IT professional up to of recent, in the past 6 years I have been in the senior IT management in commercial banking sector. I have done a little bit of telecom regulations, payments systems implementation in the banking sector, General IT and systems integration. So basically the last six years of my career I have been in payment systems, digital banking and electronic services, over and above the daily CIO duties. Payments technologies implementation: What are some of the new technologies that are being implemented in Rwanda around payment technologies? In Rwanda we have quite interesting technologies that are coming up, one of them being the mobile, this is not only in Rwanda but rather a global phenomenon. A lot of payment services now use mobile either through some products developed by commercial banks or those developed by telecom companies. There are others developed by FinTechs that are starting up in developing their own payment services using mobile technologies. However, that’s not only it, internet banking is also now a thing that is commonly used by all the premium service providers and that is spread across different sectors. When you can be able to pay your taxes, you can be able to pay your bills, you can be able to pay school fees using either your mobile or your internet banking services. There are cards that are used quite a lot in the market now. We have started to see NFC being used and some biometric services, and I believe this is just the beginning. How widespread is this, the use in the country? It is quite widespread and just like it is across East Africa, it is really widespread in Rwanda where you go to all the corners of the country you’re able to get at least ability to pay your bill or ability
1. You have to define the policies and procedures that have to be followed.
to top up your airtime or ability to send money across from one city to another city and we see that it has taken foothold on all the services and across all the parts of the country. Basing again on payment technologies, we hear a lot about security being a challenge, so what security challenges have been observed in Rwanda via payment technologies? I would say that in Rwanda as of today, God Forbid! We are still a bit lucky we have not been hit big by any incidents of a security breach but generally information security or payment security is something that every chief executive or every senior official in any organization should be worried about. If you take the recent example of a couple years when one billion dollars was lost by banks in Europe, recently 80 billion dollars was lost by a Bangladesh bank through SWIFT Payment Systems which is believed to be one of the most secure systems. That is a clear indication that people need to be concerned about that and there are so many tools out there that organisations need to employ but the challenge is the technical knowhow, the financial requirements and the processes of implementing some of these security solutions that are provided. What interventions do you think Rwanda is prepared with in case there
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2. You have to provide technologies that are able to run on those policies and platforms. For example right now there is a move to do security managed services, this is a monitoring system that will monitor any potential hackers and potential outbreaks of security incidents, then you are alerted of that breach and this scans not only one market but across the whole world and these are some of the solutions that technology providers of security services providers are providing for organisations to look at and then of course over and above that 3. You have to put in a rigorous encryption systems with different algorithms to be able to protect to your network. Let’s talk about IT teams, you’ve been leading them and you’re still leading them and possibly you’re going to continue leading them, how has been the one that you have been leading of late? They have been excellent, IT teams are the unsung heroes of the industry. There is someone who likes to say, “You enter into a room you switch on your light and they come on but you don’t understand the effort, the energy that has gone into enabling you to switch on that light and it comes on”. The IT teams are like that, the IT teams do a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes and when things are working you don’t need them or you don’t even recognize them but when things fall apart that’s when people start to call them names and give them this and that but really the amount of work they do is phenomenal. How would you go about retaining the best among your team, what do you put in place in order to retain? One of the misconceptions that people have is to think that if I give you money 25