Capitec clients affected by the late deductions for payments made during 13 and 18 December will not pay interest on negative balances the bank confirmed today. This comes after a glitch in Absa supported card machines resulted in 168,000 Capitec account holders having their pre-Christmas purchases deducted only this month.
Some clients have landed in the red as a result of the error, but Capitec said: “Our clients who have a negative balance because of this incident will not be requested to pay any interest on this amount. Neither does Capitec Bank charge penalties for incidents like these. We will however ask clients to pay the amount back over a period to be agreed with them, taking into account the amount to be repaid and their circumstances.”
Clients that don’t have negative balances but who may experience difficulty in balancing their budget spend for the month due to this specific late debit incident will also be catered to. “We will also follow the same approach and agree a suitable arrangement with them,” said the bank.
The bank added: “We will also be paying back clients for the extra SMS they received as well as waiving all statement fees for these affected clients for the period between 6 and 13 January (both dates inclusive).”
The bank said it will be contacting clients that were affected by the incident individually and will make arrangements with them accordingly. However, Charl Nel head of strategic communications, urged affected clients to still get in touch with the bank’s call centre to talk to consultants about how they’d been affected.
Capitec reiterated that no clients had the same payments deducted more than once and that Absa had not acted outside the interbank card system rules. “We did however proceed to investigate how we can implement systems to early detect a similar scenario in future,” said Capitec.
Both banks have apologised for the incident. For more on this story, read our previous report here.