After more than four hours of trying to buy a retail bond from South Africa’s National Treasury on Monday, the only word that describes my experience is “frustration”.
The frustration started at 6.30am on Monday morning, the first day of availability of the retail bonds to the general public, when the Rsaretailbonds.gov.za website would not accept my registration due to an “unknown error”.
The call centre only opened at 7.30am so I had to wait until then. I was told to resubmit and fax my application form to the call centre.
It came back and said the problem appeared to be that I had put spaces in my identity number, even though the number printed in my identity document has three spaces between the four number groups.
The website then accepted my registration, but when I went to apply to buy the bonds, my click on “apply” just brought up “my profile”, “personal details” and “transaction summary”. There was no link as to how to buy the bonds, so I once again phoned the call centre.
The call centre operator told me I had to click on “apply” a second time, but she warned me not to click on “submit” more than once as I would then submit more than one application to buy.
I followed the procedure, selecting the bond I wanted and then clicked submit only once.
This brought me to an instruction page saying my application was successful and that I only needed to make a payment via my bank to complete the transaction.
My bank is Nedbank, so I followed the instructions carefully, but once again was frustrated as “RSA Retail Bond” was not one of the options on the approved beneficiary list.
I then phoned the Nedbank call centre where I logged my complaint. The call-centre operator said she could do nothing about the beneficiary list, but she would follow it up.
The National Treasury then phoned me after I had once again told it of the problems I was encountering.
I was an isolated investor — more than 30 people had successfully completed their applications — but the Treasury would follow up with Nedbank and get back to me.
At 11.30am that is the state of play and I still have not been able to buy my retail bond. — I-Net Bridge
Nedbank clients can buy from Tuesday