More problems with card payments

Cape Town - Shoppers' problems with electronic bank payments at retailers cannot be laid at the door of Bankserv alone, says a spokesperson from the national electronic payments system.

Over the past week consumers have been tearing their hair out as problems with the system have caused money to be withdrawn from their accounts, but not register in the stores.

Many customers have been informed by store personnel that their transactions have been declined, but at the same time they have received an SMS from their banks to say that the money has been taken from their accounts.

Carel Goosen, deputy managing director of the Shoprite Group, said that from the beginning of August to the past weekend some 250 000 transactions had failed in Shoprite stores, owing to problems with the system.

Retailers like Woolworths and Pick n Pay have also been affected.

Bankserv spokesperson Brad Gillies explains that the group had a hardware crash on Tuesday last week.

All transactions were then directed to Bankserv's failure-management unit. The disruption lasted about four hours.

Gillies says Bankserv's system is once again up and running smoothly, but the group is part of such a large network that other systems' problems are also mistakenly being blamed on Bankserv.

This, he declares, was Bankserv's first major problem in five-odd years.

Consumers were still experiencing problems over the past weekend. According to players in the retail industry, electronic banking transactions have recently also been derailed by faulty Telkom lines and banking systems that were down.

The consumers reckon this could cause particular embarrassment for South Africa during the World Cup soccer tournament if foreign customers are turned away from shops because their transactions have apparently been rejected.

- Sake24.com

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