To curtail the high success rate of the ‘mysterious R99 debit order’ scam, which was recorded to have hit over 750,000 bank accounts, Payment Association of South Africa (PASA) announced a wide-reaching complex system they called Debi-Check.
This will ensure that banks will require clients to electronically confirm and permit debit so as to maintain that both the consumer and banks are on the same page as regards the amount debited. After this authorization, the mandate will be stored on the bank’s database and can be fetched at any time.
In conversation with Walter Volker, CEO PASA “This is not just a problem involving one bank, one company or one scam.
“It is an industry-wide problem and Pasa is working with all the banks to improve the safety of the system, both for consumers and for companies,” he said. He further stressed that no bank was immune to the scam and that they have been working on Debi-Check since 2013.
He continued “Right now, user companies are busy implementing the systems and introducing the new business processes that are necessary to fully utilize DebiCheck.
“Thousands of user companies, from large corporates to small business, will be using the system – so we need to ensure it remains stable and that consumers are not adversely affected.”
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Debi-Check is in its initial stages and its first phase was deployed 1 August 2018 and at that time, 11 banks had already implemented the system. However, the fight is far from over, as Volker said “Although the system is working already, it will take time for all DebiCheck users to ramp up their usage of the system,”.
He continued “This number will grow over time, and the aim ultimately is to eradicate any and all unauthorised debit orders, through a combination of DebiCheck and other, more general debit order abuse measures.”
Granted that it will take time to adopt, the Reverse Bank recently granted a 12-month extension for organizations to implement the system.
“These additional 12 months will also be used to mature the system and to phase out old contracts and systems” Volker had said.