How to minimise fees when disputing a debit order

● Familiarise yourself with your bank’s policies and the fees charged for disputing an unauthorised debit order. Some banks don’t allow you to dispute a debit order online if it is for an amount of more than R200, while some banks charge clients more to dispute a debit order if it is 40 days after the fact. And some banks don’t charge anything if you dispute the debit order via online banking or the bank’s app.

Absa

You can dispute a debit order of any amount at no cost if you do so within 40 days and via internet banking. But the bank does not facilitate online disputes for transactions older than 40 days, says Sibusiso Ngwenya, head of pricing at Absa consumer banking.

If you go into a branch to dispute a debit order it will cost you R30 if you do so within 40 days and R145 after.

Stopping an unauthorised debit order that has yet to be processed costs R30 if you do so via internet banking, and R60 at a branch.

Should the bank find that a valid mandate is not in place, you can ask it to reverse the fees. The fee is charged when the clients lodges the dispute in the branch, Ngwenya says. “Only once a finding is made that a mandate was not in place will the fees be reversed.”

Capitec

It will cost you R20 to dispute and stop a debit order if you do so within 40 days using the bank’s app.

The reversal of the funds into your account is instant if the debit order was for less than R200. If you go into a branch to dispute and stop a debit order, it will cost you R40 within 40 days of the debit order being processed and R80 after.

Head of communications Charl Nel says all future blocks of the same debit order are charged at R5.30 per block.

To protect clients from companies that put through invalid debit orders, Capitec has reduced the minimum value that triggers an SMS alert from R100 to R30 so that clients are informed of smaller debit orders on their accounts.

FNB

You can dispute a non-authenticated debit order at any time, at no cost, irrespective of the amount of the debit orders, says Ryan Prozesky, CEO of consumer core banking.

But if you want to log the dispute via electronic channels, you can only do so for debit orders of less than R200. Amounts of more than R200 need to be logged via telephone banking or inside a branch, at no charge.

Debit order disputes within 40 days are reversed immediately, whereas debit orders disputed after 40 days could take up to 30 business days.

The bank reserves the right to charge a client R130 if they have wrongfully disputed a debit order older than 40 days where a valid mandate is provided from the service provider.

You can stop a debit order that has yet to be processed, at no charge, if you do so via electronic channels and the debit order is for less than R200.

For amounts of more than R200, it will cost you R18.50 via telephone banking and R55 to do so inside a branch, to stop the debit order from being processed again in future. If the debit order is indeed unauthorised, the bank will reverse these fees.

Prozesky says FNB clients are notified via SMS every time a new debit order is raised on their accounts, drawing specific attention to the new debit order, as well as the amount and the service provider’s name, and if they believe it to be unauthorised, they have the ability to stop, dispute and reverse it. In addition, SMS notifications are sent for every debit order.

“When stopping a particular unauthorised debit order, customers are able to specify a rand value or range of amounts to prevent debit orders from a particular collector being processed in the future.

“It is advisable for consumers to select a wide rand value range to make sure that the unauthorised collector cannot simply change the rand value and thereby circumvent the stop instruction.”

Prozesky says disputing and stopping of “larger” debit orders is sometimes done by clients seeking to manage their cash flow.

In such cases the bank “would like to have a conversation” with them to make them aware of the risks of stopping or reversing a legitimate debit order.

Nedbank

It will cost you R5 to dispute a debit order — whether you do so online, via the bank’s app, at a branch or telephonically — irrespective of the amount that was debited from your account and of when you dispute the debit order.

To issue a stop payment instruction will cost you R55 if you go into a branch or do so via the call centre.

Doug Hardie, head of client services and risk at Nedbank retail, says if it is established that there was not a valid mandate in place for the debit order, the bank will reverse these fees.

Standard Bank

Standard Bank does not charge clients to dispute and stop unauthorised debit orders if they do so within 40 days, irrespective of the amount and of the channel used. But if you dispute 40 days or more after the debit order in question, it will cost you R290.

If it turns out that there is not a valid mandate in place, the fee will not be charged, says Nolene Parboo, head of transactional products at Standard Bank personal and business banking.