Standard Bank's Shyft travel card product cannot be trusted to process hotel transactions correctly, leaving you out of pocket

This is a warning to all Standard Bank Shyft Travel card customers to please regularly scrutinize your card statement and balances, especially if you use the card for hotel or accommodation expenses where the merchant places an initial pre-authorized funds hold on your card. If you don't you are likely to be end up out of pocket like me. Based on my recent experience Shyft does not process the clearing of preauthorizations correctly and you will be left out of pocket. Shyft will tell you that "sometimes there are problems with processing the clearance / completion of preauthorizations" and you will need to fill in a dispute form to get your funds back. Well in my recent experience it is not "sometimes" ...it is all the time, and why should I as the customer be put through the inconvenience of filling out merchant dispute forms when it is not convenient to do so when one is travelling, and when I have emailed Shyft with ample evidence from the merchant! If you don't scrutinize your statement and balances regularly you will end up like I did...out of pocket to the tune of several hundred Euro on your trip! The bottom line is that the Shyft system does not process hotel / accommodation merchant preauthorizations and completions or cancellations thereof reliably, and Standard Bank refuses to acknowledge that they have a problem that needs to be fixed in their Shyft backend system. I recently went on an overseas trip and used the card extensively and it worked well. However, two of the hotels I stayed at did what some accommodation merchants do: they did an initial preauth (funds hold) against my card which immediately debited my balance, followed by a final amount completion at the end of my stay. In both cases the Shyft system failed to process the completion and cancellation of these up-front preauthorizations. After waiting the usual 7 business days for the funds to be credited back to my balance, I eventually contacted Shyft support using the Shyft mobile app, and they said I should wait a bit longer. I eventually gave up and insisted that they correct my card balance after providing ample evidence to them that the merchants in question had done everything by the book on their end according to standard industry practice. These were not insignificant amounts of 300 euro and 80 gbp, amounts that I needed available on my card to fund my ongoing travel expenses. Shyft support insisted that I had to fill in a hardcopy merchant dispute form and send it to them even though the merchant was not at fault, and even though I did not have access to a printer and scanner on my trip. After much back and forth over the Shyft app support chat and also email I managed to eventually persuade the Shyft support team to correct my balance for the 300 euro case without submitting a form, but the overall experience was one of extreme inconvenience to me, with Shyft still to this day not admitting that they had a system problem! When I got back from my trip I discovered the second problem with a hotel preauth not being credited to my balance (this is over 1 month after I checked out from the hotel!) and Shyft made me fill in the form to recover the missing funds.

As much as I would love to give this travel wallet product 5 stars for innovation and usefulness as a flexible multi-currency travel wallet solution, this is the straw that breaks the camels back for me, and due to the fact that Standard Bank refuse to actually acknowledge that they have a major problem with their Shyft system I feel compelled to raise public awareness of this.