Mobile Banking and Commercial Bank Performance Nexus in Zimbabwe (2011-2021): Impact and Implications

The study investigated mobile banking and commercial banks’performance nexus in Zimbabwe for the period 2011-2021.The investigation employed a pragmatic approach and a descriptive design.Primary data as well as secondary data were used to achieve the study objectives.Questionnaires,interviews and documentary guides were used to collect primary and secondary data respectively.There were 108 questionnaires distributed to staff members and customers of 6 sampled commercial banks in Zimbabwe having mobile banking experience.The interview guide was administered to bank managers to get a deeper understanding of the topic under research and as a mitigation strategy for addressing the flaws of the questionnaires.Analysis of quantitative data utilised descriptive analysis tools,correlations analysis tools as well as regression analysis tools whereas theme analysis was used for qualitative data.SPSS version 26 was used for this purpose.The study implications established that mobile banking and commercial banks’performance nexus in Zimbabwe was significant and also enhanced mobile banking security capabilities and strengthened commercial banks’performance.The investigation concluded that mobile banking’s success in enhancing commercial banks’performance hinged on its ability to allow the user to get easier,cheaper and timely access to services.However,the study results showed that the cost of mobile banking services,government policies and intense competition inhibited the uptake of banking services.Commercial banks are recommended to continue strengthening the security of mobile banking services and to boost their uptake by bank customers in Zimbabwe.

Reverse Engineering of Mobile Banking Applications

Software reverse engineering is the process of analyzing a software system to extract the design and implementation details.Reverse engineering provides the source code of an application,the insight view of the architecture and the third-party dependencies.From a security perspective,it is mostly used for finding vulnerabilities and attacking or cracking an application.The process is carried out either by obtaining the code in plaintext or reading it through the binaries or mnemonics.Nowadays,reverse engineering is widely used for mobile applications and is considered a security risk.The Open Web Application Security Project(OWASP),a leading security research forum,has included reverse engineering in its top 10 list of mobile application vulnerabilities.Mobile applications are used in many sectors,e.g.,banking,education,health.In particular,the banking applications are critical in terms of security as they are used for financial transactions.A security breach of such applications can result in huge financial losses for the customers as well as the banks.There exist various tools for reverse engineering of mobile applications,however,they have deficiencies,e.g.,complex configurations,lack of detailed analysis reports.In this research work,we perform an analysis of the available tools for reverse engineering of mobile applications.Our dataset consists of the mobile banking applications of the banks providing services in Pakistan.Our results indicate that none of the existing tools can carry out the complete reverse engineering process as a standalone tool.In addition,we observe significant differences in terms of the execution time and the number of files generated by each tool for the same file.

Towards the Advancement of Cashless Transaction: A Security Analysis of Electronic Payment Systems

In recent decades, day-to-day lifestyle requires online payments as easy and simple solutions to several financial transactions, which makes the concept of Electronic payment Systems very popular in the growth of a cashless society. In fact, cashless transactions through simple mobile apps are not merely a concept anymore rather are implemented robustly and being used extensively. On the dark side, obvious financial benefits are making these apps vulnerable to being attacked, which can be successful through security breaches. These cybersecurity issues need to be traced out and resolved to make the financial transactions through an app secure and trustworthy. In this paper, several related papers are analyzed to trace out possible cybersecurity issues in the domain of Electronic Transaction System. The objective is to establish sufficient theoretical background to propose methodologies for measuring security issues and also identify the security strength of any FinTech application and provide standard security metrics.