The Shoprite Group on Friday expressed its dismay at what it called “apparent indifference demonstrated by commercial banks in South Africa to successfully address intermittent system failures in the country’s national electronic payment system [EPS]”.
Shoprite said the systems failures had caused consumers “endless frustration” and left them disenchanted with retailers.
The retailer pointed to all PIN-based electronic transactions, including ATM transactions, as again being affected by Bankserv system failures this past week, which reached a peak on Tuesday.
It resulted in payments for goods being debited against consumers’ accounts while vendors received no value, leaving many consumers out of pocket and without their purchases, Shoprite said.
The retailer then attacked bank staff, adding that retailers and consumers’ frustration alike was further fuelled by “uninformed bank staff” who, reportedly, sent shoppers back to stores to have their problems resolved.
Shoprite Group deputy managing director Carel Goosen said that Shoprite would lobby at Reserve Bank level in an effort to force banks to resolve the problems.
“Bankserv is an automated clearing house owned by the banks and provides interbank electronic transaction switching and settlement services to the South African banking sector. When an authorisation request is sent from the vendors to the banks via Bankserv, the bank sends an approval to the vendor and puts an authorisation against a shopper’s account, after which the money is withdrawn by the banks from the account and placed in a holding account,” Goosen said.
“However, an intermittent malfunction in the system causes the value never to be sent to the vendor which results in an uncompleted sale and therefore the transaction is declined. In the meantime many customers, while still at the checkout, receive a mobile phone text message from their bank that the transaction has been completed, but the information on the cashier’s terminal advises that the transaction has been declined,” he said.
The MD said that such an incident occurred on Tuesday at 1am, when the interbank switch developed processing problems that affected all debit card transactions and some credit card transactions.
“Two hours later Bankserv was still investigating a solution and retailers continued to experience random declines and timeouts throughout the week,” he said.
“While retailers obviously lose turnover when this happens, the real issue for the Shoprite Group is the detrimental effect Bankserv’s system failures have on the supermarket group’s service levels.
“Our aim is to provide consumers with a hassle-free shopping experience and we have invested millions of rands into world-class information technology systems with which to make that possible for our customers.
“Unfortunately we have no control over the National Payment System and we therefore hope that Reserve Bank intervention will bring a speedy resolution to the problem for the benefit of our customers,” Goosen concluded. — I-Net Bridge