E-commerce capabilities assessment: -security of e-payment systems- case of the democratic republic of congo

V.2.2.2 Digital Certificate

The study result reports that only one (1) among six (6) assessed institutions has a certificate server installed. This means that in most of these banks, electronic transactions are not signed. This implies high risk of data falsification and transaction repudiation because the integrity of data can't be guaranteed.

Commercial banks in DRC must implement digital certificate infrastructure to ensure electronic transactions to be signed digitally to enforce their integrity.

V.2.2.3 Antivirus

All the assessed IT systems have antivirus software installed and managed to clean and fix all virus infection.

V.2.2.4 Authentication and Authorization

The study result reveals existence of authentication and authorization facilities in all the assessed companies. However the physical access control to the computers systems hosting very sensitive data need to be addressed.

V.2.2.5 Contingency plan

E-payment systems, by their nature, must be accessible and available any time. Their availability is one of the sine qua non conditions for an effective use in e-commerce transaction.

Despite the fact that backup facilities exist for data and power source, there is no written plan for business continuity. So in case of failure, the e-payment systems can't be recovered in acceptable delay.

To illustrate this argument, during our research, one of the mobile company assessed experienced a fire incident at one of its data center and the m-payment system was affected during a period of five (5) days.

The availability of the e-payment system requires commercial banks and mobile operators offering m-payment services to implement contingency plan to improve the system recovery.

To answer to the main research question, from the conclusions given above, it appears that the security of e-payment systems, according the CIA concept used for this study, is yet to be implemented. However, the two main fields of improvement are the integrity which is to be enforced by the implementation of certificate servers and the availability which must be sustained by a development of business contingency plans to guarantee a quick recovery of the system in case of failure.

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V.3. Recommendations

The main objective of this research was to investigate the security of e-payment systems in the Democratic republic of Congo (DRC) to assess their readiness for an effective development of e-commerce.

The security concept of the information system being wide, the study focused on three major concepts; confidentiality, integrity and availability.

In order to contribute really on the development of e-commerce, commercial banks are recommended the following points:

1. The top management has to make sure that security plan is developed in the bank regarding the e-payment system mostly to ensure that e-payment system guarantee confidentiality, integrity of electronic transactions, and availability of the e-payment system to allow its effective use in e-commerce transaction.

2. The top management has to integrate the security of the information system among the priority of their future IT infrastructure.

3. The e-commerce development will bring new business opportunity for the banks and e-payment system is one of the strategic components to ensure a competitive advantage in the sector. Therefore, plan must be developed to anticipate the growth of this business in short term. Therefore, improvement of security of e-payment system must be addressed as a priority action.

4. E-payment systems must be developed with the aim to reduce and fight against the main issues faced by the e-payment systems reported in this study such as fraud, theft, unavailability and disclosure of sensitive information.

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Areas for further research

There are still many areas to cover in the field of the security of the e-payment systems which can interest researchers such as identity management, development of security policies and procedures, regulation of the electronic transactions.

However, this study illustrated some other capabilities to develop for an effective e-commerce development in the country. Among these capabilities, support services for e-commerce such as order fulfillment, logistics, and the development of the security systems are other areas of interest for further studies.

This study has a merit of being among the first in the country because the e-commerce development is yet in its inception phase. It will be therefore subject to criticism for improvements to ensure that existing e-payment systems be leveraged for an effective development of e-commerce in the country.

V.5. Study limitations

The conclusion and recommendations of this study are to be considered within the specific limitations and conditions under which the research has been conducted such as sample of informants, data collection method and the data analysis.

The seizing of the sample took into account only commercial banks and mobile operator companies offering e-payment services in Kinshasa, capital city of the DRC. The low response rate for this research is to be considered also among the limitations from the conclusion drowned for this study.

The responses received are related to the data collection method used and the kind of questions used for the assessment. This study used closed-end questions built from the check list provided by ISO 27001 frameworks. Not all the check lists have been used for this research but only few of them considered as more relevant for the CIA security concept used in this study.

The study uses the quantitative analysis method based on the likert scale data collected through the questionnaire. According to the research question, the research uses two mains statistical analysis tools such as means and mode to assess the security capabilities observed. The limitations of this method with such kind of assessment based on checklist are that correlation or regression analysis can't be done because conclusions are directly linked to scores corresponding to likert scales.

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7: Appendix