IS THERE A CREDIT CARD MANAGER AT STANDARD BANK?

I have been with the best bank, STANDARD - for close on 50 years - and have used many of their product offerings, ESPECIALLY THEIR CREDIT CARD FACILITY, with great joy over the years. But as that raging tooth ache suddenly appears out of nowhere, I get this humdinger of a situation which has done all, but burst my jugular.

Here is the thing: March 2021 I aim to have my wife’s car serviced – it is going to cost most than my pension-cash flow will allow, so I request advice from the bank how to go about placing the deal on budget.

“Do a straight transaction – and once done, advise us thereof and we will transfer it to budget”

On the 30 March 2021 I do the deal and a few days thereafter I advise the bank and they promise to transfer the deal to budget. On the 8 April 2021, I go into my Online Banking Facility (OBS) to ascertain if what I requested, was actually done. In line with the good service I have always had from my bank, I confirm that it was!

To this very day, I have no idea what prompted me to look back at previous transactions, but I did. Remember, I was doing this on the 8 April 2021. I noted that after a cash finance charge debit of R6.51 on the 6 March 2021, the balance was R1,482.05. This concurred with the Closing Balance shown under the Account Summary on my Credit Card Statement (CCS) dated 6 March 2021, so I was happy.

However – here comes the clanger – the very next debit shown in the OBS, also dated 6 March 2021, was for an amount of R550.40. (By the way that previous debit and this one were both correct.) That being the case, I was astonished to see that the balance was now shown as R9,876.28! Doing the math I noted that an *******, **********, “miraculous” (in the words of one manager I dealt with) debit was injected into my balance column, between the above two debits, without any details or references at all. This ******* debit – which was exactly the same amount as that large budget amount transacted on the 30 March 2021– was injected into my credit balance some 3 weeks before it was known. How was that possible? I immediately wrote my first email to the bank asking for an explanation.

Now, noticing their error (or trying to execute a cover-up – I honestly do not know which at this stage), an almighty blunder is attempted on the very next CSS dated 6 April 2021. Under the Account Summary on this CSS, adding the numbers given, simply do not add up to the Closing Balance shown – but they do agree with the balance in the OBS of that date! This goes to prove that that ******* debit is most definitely still in the system.

Bank clients are at a disadvantage – we can only go back 3 months in the system, so it is impossible to undertake a reconciliation for the period from 1 March 2021 up to the end of October, say. Every effort has been made since that first email on the 8 April to resolve this serious problem. In fact, I have recorded 78 correspondence entries in my file – requesting over and over again for explanations – the stock reply has been, “I have gone through your statement and I could not find any discrepancy”. Even if that was the case – which it categorically is not – why no explanations as to how this was done? I have pleaded and begged, asked for and demanded to speak to the Credit Card Manager, to no avail. So it is with this writing that I sincerely hope I will be able to report that, yes, there is a Credit Card Manager at Standard, and no, managers at Standard are not prevented from speaking to clients, but through a series of misunderstandings and similar, my request got misplaced. And yes, the Manager I spoke to eventually solved this serious problem. Why serious? I surely cannot have been the only one to have suffered this ******* action. Then, with all the un-user-friendly processes in place, how will you ever possibly resolve such a query, months after the event?