You now have 60 days to challenge debit orders

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JIMMY MOYAHA: Debit orders in South Africa are seeing a significant change, effective the 13th of April this year, 2026.

The South African Reserve Bank and the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) have confirmed that there is a new rule standardising the dispute period related to all debit-order instruments. Previously this was set at around 40 days to dispute any debit orders.

In some cases, it might have been longer, in some cases it might have been shorter, but we are now moving from a 40-day challenge period to a 60-day period.

Read:
Mystery R99 debit hits SA accounts [Dec 2018]
Mystery debit orders leave bank client without answers [Jun 2025]
More incidents of unexplained debit order activity [Jul 2025]

For more on this, I’m joined on the line by the chief executive officer of the Payments Association of South Africa, Ghita Erling, to see what to make of it. Ghita, lovely having you on the show. Thanks so much for taking the time.

We’ve seen different banks operate under different parameters. They follow almost a general guideline, but [what is] the importance of being able to kind of standardise the process?

GHITA ERLING: Good evening, Jimmy, and good evening to your listeners. Thank you. The reason that we’ve done this change is twofold.

The first is that for a number of years we’ve been seeking to deal with abuse in the debit order system.

Now that can take place in the form of R99 or R199 debit orders, which is something we’ve largely managed to remove from the system due to some due-diligence processes we put in place.

The other form of abuse we sometimes see in the system is the spurious disputing of debit orders when consumers find themselves a little short of cash.

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So, as you point out, this change is intended both to standardise the way that debit order disputes are dealt [with] across the different debit order systems, so that consumers don’t have to know which one was used to collect their money, and it’s also intended to remove the opportunities for abuse and to balance the rights of collectors and payers more evenly.

As you mentioned earlier, today payers have up to 40 days to dispute a debit order in most instances. After 40 days, there’s a process where the mandate to collect that debit order will be called for, and the payer may or may not get their monies refunded.

What we’re doing now is to allow up to 60 days for the refund to happen without calling for any information. But after 60 days the opportunity for the dispute falls away, which means that the collector has much greater certainty that the funds are unlikely to be reversed.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Ghita, take us through the process of debit-order recollections, or at least the attempt to cancel a debit order. Take us through kind of what happens from a payments perspective, from a banking and a financial institution perspective, that makes the process so lengthy and sometimes so expensive.

GHITA ERLING: Well, we’ve moved out the lengthy piece of it, so that should already make a big difference. But let me talk you through the process.

The first thing is, depending on which debit-order system is being used, you may have been called on to authenticate the mandate in a DebiCheck debit order.

In that scenario, you as the payer will have confirmed the details of the debit order, and the debit order will only be allowed to run within those details – which means your opportunities for disputing it are reduced.

In every other instance, [if] you see a debit hit your account and you don’t know where it came from, or you know it wasn’t allowed to be collected, you would either go onto your online banking app or you could contact your bank.

You will call for a dispute, and if it’s within 60 days the refund will be done immediately. After 60 days, that’s a different discussion entirely.

Then the other point about all of that is that the collector has to return the funds within those periods, and that process will be run by your bank.

JIMMY MOYAHA: So Ghita, from a consumer perspective, now that we have this increased period to query or to stop these debit orders – you touched on the fact that this is about striking that balance between protecting the consumers but also protecting the service providers themselves – what do consumers then need to know, if anything, about challenging these transactions?

Do we see any changes in terms of process, or does the process remain the same and we’re just afforded greater time in the process?

GHITA ERLING: There are a couple of things about this. The first is we always encourage consumers to contact their service provider upfront.

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So if they’re concerned that money shouldn’t have been deducted, it’s ideal if they sort it out with the service provider. We know that that doesn’t always work, which is why we allow for the dispute.

So we would encourage payers to keep a good eye on their bank accounts, to watch the notifications that are coming through because you have only the 60 days in order to dispute the debit order.

We further encourage them to think about the consequences if they dispute a debit order which is actually a valid one. So if you return the collection of your insurance funds, what impact does that have on your cover?

So it’s quite important in our view that payers do two things. They engage with the collector, consider the impacts of disputing the debit order, and also watch what’s going through their bank account.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Ghita, what if we’ve got existing debit orders? I imagine the existing mandates and whatever is in place, existing, will not be affected too much. It’ll just be more from a banking perspective and a service-provider perspective what they allow after the debit orders have been processed. It won’t affect anything that is currently in the market.

GHITA ERLING: Yes. So as a consumer, you don’t need to do anything to change. Automatically, whether it’s a new debit order or an old debit order, you will now have the 60 days.

If you’ve authenticated the debit order, then only if you had, for example, cancelled the debit order, would you be able to dispute it.

But in other cases, irrespective of when you agreed to that debit order, the increase to the 60 days is now in place.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Ghita, in some cases, we have extended periods from a debit order perspective and a dispute period perspective, some going up to as far as a year.

Can you perhaps take us through what some of those exceptional examples might look like, and whether or not they’re going to be affected by the … period now being imposed?

GHITA ERLING: Some of our debit-order systems currently up till 13th of April do allow for disputes to take place for up to a year. That will fall away. That will reduce down to the 60 days.

So we have now standardised across all the debit-order systems. The big thing though, of course, is if there is fraud suspected.

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If, for example, the account that’s collecting the money from your account is a fraudulent account, then of course we can deal with it [within] any period.

But for a stock standard debit order with a normal mandate, all of them will reduce to 60 days for dispute.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Ghita, does it matter if I’ve signed a mandate or not? You touched on the fact that in some cases there’s a mandate existing and it governs the parameters of the debit order.

In other cases, where I haven’t expressly as a consumer signed a mandate but there is a debit order in place, how does that work? Is that going to be changed? Are we going to look to kind of standardise mandates across the different service providers?

GHITA ERLING: We see two different types of mandates. One is where you’ve authenticated the mandate through a bank channel with your bank.

Your bank would have sent you a notification via your app, USSD or via some other mechanism, asking ‘Did you agree to this debit order with the service provider?’.

Once you’ve authenticated the debit order, then you can dispute it only under very specific circumstances like, for example, if you had cancelled the contract.

Other instances could be where you sign the debit order directly with the service provider themselves. This could be you sign a document and send a PDF via WhatsApp, or you sign off on the website of the service provider, or you give them a telephonic confirmation on a sales call; in those instances the 60 days then apply.

JIMMY MOYAHA: It’s important, folks, to remember the debit orders that you are signing on for, depending on how you engage in those debit orders, because now you will have only 60 days to challenge them in the event that something is wrong.

Remember that challenging them does not mean that you can avoid your obligations to financial institutions; it is merely in case somebody is trying to take your money. We’ll leave the conversation on that note.

Thanks so much to the chief executive officer of the Payments Association of South Africa, Ghita Erling, for joining us to look at the adjustments being made to debit orders in South Africa and the standardisation that is coming into effect from the 13th of April.

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