Shoprite wants Reserve Bank to solve Bankserv problems

Shoprite Group deputy managing director Carel Goosen said that through the supermarket group's membership of the South African Retailers Payment Issues Forum (SARPIF) it has played a leading role in highlighting Bankserv systems issues over the past four years. There has been no noticeable improvement and Shoprite is now lobbying at Reserve Bank level in an effort to force banks to resolve the problems.

Problems, frustration

The failures 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. Uninformed bank staff repeatedly sending shoppers back to stores to have their problems resolved further fuelled retailers and consumers' frustration alike.

“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,” explains Goosen. “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the bank sends an approval to the vendor and puts an authorisation against a shopper's account after which the money is withdrawn by the banks from the account and placed in a holding account.

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 mean time 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.

The real issue…

“This past Tuesday at 11am, the interbank switch developed processing problems, which 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.

“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 excellent 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.