"Excess Fee" First Nation Bank South Africa

Good day. I have an "Excess Fee" query that I recently noted from FNB. I have a business account with FNB and at the time, I was not used to seeing these excess fee and did not undertsand how they came about. So when I saw the first few ones, I tried resolving it by going into the branch. They told me goods were honored without sufficient funds. This gave me a headache as I was sure there were funds in the account. I had robust discussions with the staff in 2018 at Riverside in Nelspruit. So I wrote an email to FNB at the time and I received this feedback bellow:

Diphoko, Joe <***> Jun 14, 2018, 6:57 AM to ***

Good morning Mr. Magagula,

I have contacted you on the 13th June 2018 at 13:06 from the number *** and left a message to return my call.

We hereby acknowledge the complaint that you have lodged regarding the fees charged on your account and we would like to respond as follows:

The fees charged to your account relate to debits (be it debit order, card swiping ,etc) on your account without sufficient funds.

For every debit that went through your account without sufficient funds, account ended up in excess (minus balance) and attracted a fee of R156.36 for every debit that resulted in excess.

We would also like to refer you to point 4 of the terms and conditions of the cheque account below:

4. Customer must not exceed available balance The customer may only instruct FNB to process payment instructions (such as debit orders; stop orders; debit card purchases or cheques) if the customer has enough money available in the customer's transactional account (available balance). For the purposes of this agreement (the customer's Iransactional bank account) "available balance" means the credit balance less the amount of un-cleared funds deposited and the amount of funds reserved for other purposes. (Note: that any funds reserved for point of sale transactions will only be processed against the customer's transactional account when the merchant has successfully banked transactions with their bank. Until this occurs, it is the customer's responsibility to monitor the customer's transactional account, and not to use those reserved funds). The available balance in the customer's transactional account does not include the money available in linked accounts. The customer may not request or apply for a credit agreement by instructing FNB to process a payment instruction where there is no available balance in the customer's transactional account. FNB will not honour payment instructions where there is no available balance in the transactional account. However (in exceptional circumstances, due to an error or at FNB's discretion) FNB may honour payment instructions where there is no available balance in the transactional account. FNB will charge a service fee for honouring these payment instructions. The service fee will be charged per payment instruction honoured. FNB has the right to immediately demand repayment from the customer of the amount overspent on the transactional account (the amount with which the payment instruction(s) amount was more than the available balance in the customer's transactional account). If the customer does not make payment of the overspent amount when demanded to do so, FNB may charge default (mora) interest as allowed by law. In addition FNB has the rights sel out in clause 12. For applicable fees, interest and charges, kindly view FNB's pricing guide at www.fnb.co.za. The customer must contact FNB and arrange for a temporary overdraft, before the customer instructs FNB to process a payment instruction that will cause the customer to spend more than the available balance in the customer's transactional account.

cid:***4311B0

The fees charged therefore relate to the debits honoured in absence of sufficient funds.

Please feel free to contact me should you need further clarity on any of the above-mentioned matters.

FNB remains committed to clarifying these matters to our clients’ satisfaction and we will gladly give advice in order to avoid these types of situations.

Kind Regards.

To my disbelief, I further had "excess fee's" going off in my account to my suprise, they were reversed and I forgot to follow up on many of them after the responses and the manner in which FNB dealt with my grievances. To my understanding, the card declines purchases when there are no funds available, so it does not accomodate the reasons given by FNB that I was given goods without funds. The only logical understanding is that funds were theere in the account but the merchant did not bank their speedpoint facilities after the end of business. I suffered a great deal due to these funds being deducted as I am a small business owner and at the time, I lost traction and my employees decided to leave. I experienced a lo of hardships in that time due to not being able to stay affloat. I demand dignifying assistance from FNB, as I was not shown any at the time I tried to resolve this situation through provided channels as no one would listen to me at the time. It only registered recently after they reversed some of these "excess fee" charges. Thank you.