A system failure on November 3 affected Bankserv’s service to most debit and credit card holders in the country, initially for 15 minutes, followed by intermittent periods of instability throughout the day.<\/p>\n
Bankserv is owned by the country’s commercial banks and is licensed by PASA.<\/p>\n
“As a result of this systems failure some customers’ card accounts (current account, savings or credit card) were debited, but as the confirmation of the transaction could not be communicated to the merchants, it was regarded as a decline or failed transaction,” PASA said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The banks whose customers were affected by the technical failure had subsequently been working on reconciling and correcting these accounts, but due to the unusually high volumes, a large part of the work was being done manually, PASA added.<\/p>\n
“It is important for affected cardholders to be aware that no transaction logs have been lost, and that each and every card account will be corrected during the next few days.”<\/p>\n
PASA added that most banks had already completed the corrections, and it had been assured that all corrections would be completed by the end of this week.<\/p>\n
“As stated in previous communications, the incident on November 3 resulted from accumulation of highly unusual events, and is the first such outage in over five years.”<\/p>\n
PASA said an average of 1.3 million transactions was processed every day.<\/p>\n
PASA, mandated by the South African Reserve Bank, is the payment system management body responsible for regulating its members with regards to payments.<\/p>\n
“PASA is working with all the key stakeholders to ensure that the probability of a repeat of such an incident is reduced to the absolute minimum,” it said.<\/p>\n
It added that the general availability of the debit and credit card payment systems had been constant at a level of over 99 percent over the past few years.<\/p>\n
“We look forward to continuing at these levels going forward,” said Walter Volker, Pasa’s CEO.<\/p>\n