It’ll be smooth sailing – Sassa

GRANT beneficiaries in Kimberley and the Northern Cape have been assured by the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) that August payments will be smooth sailing.

This follows system glitches during the July payment to grant beneficiaries which resulted in late payments.

“Sassa is ready for the August payment cycle at a technical and human resource level. This comes after the July system got marred by system glitches that affected 700 000 of the 12 million beneficiaries that Sassa provides with social grants. The problem affected beneficiaries using the new Sassa gold card,” the agency said yesterday.

Although Sassa had paid money into all the accounts, the beneficiaries could not withdraw their money due to a systems overload.

According to Sassa, the South African Post Office (Sapo) system could not handle the huge number of transactions that it had to process.

Sapo has, however, now completed upgrades to its Sassa social grants IT system - in time for the end-of-July payment cycle.

“Our IT systems is ready for the upcoming month-end payments and we are confident that social grant beneficiaries will witness a smooth payments experience,” Sapo chief operating officer Lindiwe Kwele said.

Kwele said technicians have been working tirelessly with industry stakeholders since the beginning of the month to optimise the post office’s transaction capacity.

“Infrastructure upgrades have also been implemented on Postbank’s connectivity to Bankserv to improve transaction speeds,” she said.

The post office said the upgrades would allow Sapo sufficient capacity to process grant payments transaction volumes involving social beneficiaries that have migrated to the new gold Sassa card.

“The IT improvements that Sapo has made have increased its processing capacity to better than 160 transactions per second – an improvement of more than 700%, and in line with banking industry standards,” the post office said.

Sapo is the gazetted preferred payment channel for all social grants in South Africa in a government-led initiative.

As part of the initiative, Sapo and Sassa are currently migrating social grant beneficiaries to a new gold Sassa card that is tailored to prevent illegal deductions on social grants.

The new Sassa card operates fully within the national payment system and social grants beneficiaries can use it to make ATM and merchant cash withdrawals, free retail merchant purchases as well as to withdraw cash over the counter inside a post office.

“Beneficiaries that switched to the new gold Sassa card do not have to go queue at the post office to access their money. On midnight July 31, the money will be credited into the accounts and beneficiaries can make transactions with their cards from any of the channels available to them,” the post office said.

According to the post office, the new card does not work at the old pay-points where they were previously paid in cash.

“It is important for social grants beneficiaries to note that once you have switched to the new gold Sassa card before July 22, you cannot use the new card at your previous Sassa pay-point.

“Your social grant money will automatically be paid into the new card and, if you so wish, you can withdraw cash at any ATM, over the till at shops such as Shoprite and Boxer, the post office or you can simply use your card to buy goods at any shops that accept bank cards,” Kwele said.

Sassa is also in the process of rationalising its pay-points, and some of them may be decommissioned.

The post office said the old white Sassa card will also expire at the end of September 2018 and beneficiaries should use the limited time left to switch to the new one.

To get the new Sassa card, beneficiaries should bring their ID to any Sassa office, a selected post office branch or a dedicated card swop site.

Sapo and Sassa have deployed teams throughout the country where dedicated temporary card swop sites are established using existing infrastructure