ABSA Bank worse than ithala

I made a payment for a service. The merchant gets a slip from their speed point saying Auth only and not purchase successful.

This means the money is not in my account, not in the merchants account. It’s just sitting in absa somewhere.

There are no immediate fixes to this issue, on the phone no one can make the payment be successful for the merchant and no one can reverse it back to my account so I can try to pay again.

The only option is to sent the authorisations department an email, because some idiot in absa thought it be ideal for customer service to put together such a process and no online or over the phone help. The email response time is 24-48 hrs.

Well done smart ones at absa. You are working like the ANC government