How we research.
Every guide in Insights is written by Zabble and carries the firm’s name rather than an individual’s. That is deliberate. These are not opinion pieces; they are the patterns we see building operational systems, set down so they hold up to a sceptical reader. This page explains the standard the byline stands on.
Why the byline reads “By Zabble”
The guide is the work of the firm, not of one author performing expertise. The people who write these pieces are the people who build the systems they describe, so the accountable name is the one that did the building. We would rather earn trust through what we can demonstrate, the systems shipped, the sources cited, the reasoning shown, than borrow it from a personal brand or, worse, an invented one. We never publish under a fabricated identity.
Grounded in systems we have actually built
The first-hand experience comes first. Each guide grows out of real engagements, a reconciliation engine, a fraud-monitoring build, a client-onboarding workflow, rather than a survey of what others have written. Where we draw on a specific client’s problem we anonymise it, describing the shape of the work without naming the business or exposing anything confidential. What we have shipped, and how, is set out on our about page.
Sourced from named, verifiable authorities
Every statistic in a guide carries a number, a named publisher, a year and a link to the original, listed in the Sources block at the foot of the article. We cite the authority directly so you can check the figure yourself rather than take ours for it. Naming a body is attribution of public data, never an implication that it endorses Zabble; none of them do.
- SABRIC — South African Banking Risk Information Centre — banking and digital fraud statistics.
- ACFE — Association of Certified Fraud Examiners — occupational-fraud detection and loss data.
- IHL Group — Retail research — inventory distortion, out-of-stock and overstock cost.
- McKinsey Global Institute — Automation potential across occupations and activities.
- Okta — Application-sprawl benchmarks across real deployments.
- Splunk — Dark-data research — the share of collected data left untapped.
- APQC — Process benchmarking — financial-close cycle times.
- Signicat & Fenergo — Digital onboarding abandonment and KYC client loss.
- Harvard Business Review — Lead-response timing research.
Where a guide turns on South African regulation, we reference the framework by name, so the obligation is specific rather than gestured at:
Reviewed before it publishes
Each guide leads with a direct answer, then carries the argument in question-led sections so a reader, or an answer engine, can lift a self-contained response from any one of them. Before publishing we check every claim against its source, confirm each figure is current, and read the piece against the question it set out to answer. The provenance line on each article records when it was last reviewed and how many primary sources it rests on.
What we will not do
- Invent a person, a quote or a job title to make a point sound authoritative.
- State a statistic without a named, dated, verifiable source.
- Imply that any cited body, partner or client endorses Zabble.
- Present a client’s confidential work without anonymising it.
About the pull-quotes
The large lines set off in each guide are not quotations from a named speaker. They are sentences lifted from the article itself and set large to mark the turn of the argument, a typographic emphasis, nothing attributed to a voice that does not exist.