From 13 April 2026, debit orders in South Africa will be disputable for up to 60 days – where the underlying service rules allow it.
By Pieter Brand, head of product at Hyphen
Both the South African Reserve Bank and the Financial Sector Conduct Authority have confirmed the change. Is South Africa ready for it?
A Recent History of Debit Orders in SA
Understanding where we’ve come from helps explain where we’re headed and why.
Cast your mind back to around 2015. The industry suddenly found itself dealing with a wave of rogue debit orders – most of them pegged at R99. That figure wasn’t random. It sat just below the threshold at which most banks would alert customers to the transaction.
Banks responded quickly, making it far easier for clients to dispute debit orders by adding functionality to ATMs, online banking, and banking apps. Call centre volumes dropped as self-service took over.
But the number of disputes didn’t fall – if anything, consumer education and digital channels made it easier than ever to raise one.
DebiCheck – The Industry’s Answer to Wrongful Disputes
DebiCheck grew out of SARB Directive 1 of 2017 and went live on 1 May 2021.
The concept is elegant in its simplicity. DebiCheck balances a consumer’s right to dispute with a business’s need for protection against wrongful disputes. A business sends an electronic copy of its collection agreement through the consumer’s bank, and the consumer approves it in their preferred banking channel.
The bank then holds a record of that agreement. Provided the business collects strictly within the agreed terms – even within the 60-day automated dispute window – those collections won’t be disputable.
Is the Industry Ready?
Businesses with higher collection risk – typically credit providers or those selling goods on hire purchase – have already embraced DebiCheck enthusiastically.
And it makes sense. When you’re providing a loan or goods that are repaid over time, the added cost of ensuring your collections are non-disputable is easily justified, alongside the other benefits of a premium collection service.
Where disputes do increase, I expect it will fall on businesses in one of two categories.
The first is businesses with a higher-risk client base that haven’t yet adopted tools like DebiCheck. For them, the extended 60-day window will be a push – either toward adopting new services for at least part of their debit order book, or toward factoring the additional dispute losses into their pricing.
The second is businesses using traditional debit order functionality – those that typically supply a service or goods on an ongoing basis and can simply stop delivery when payment stops. They’ll need to weigh the cost of premium services like DebiCheck against what they stand to lose when disputes come in. In some cases, losing two months of premiums or a high acquisition cost of getting a new customer could make that investment worthwhile.
There’s another angle worth considering, too: the simplification of dispute rules makes it easier than ever to adopt a multi-instrument strategy where different collection instruments are used based on the behaviour of consumers.
In both cases, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at how you’re contracting with your client base – to make sure you can use the right instrument at the right time.
The common sticking point for businesses is finding a systematic representation of the collection agreement (mandate) in DebiCheck. Almost universally, the initial instinct is to reach for the least disputable mandate available.
That reasoning is understandable. But a more practical approach is to have the mandate reflect real-world behaviour. Disputability happens at the level of the monthly financial transaction – not the mandate itself.
When the mandate accurately reflects how a business actually collects, disputes tend to fall, and consumers are more likely to understand and accept the agreement from the outset.
Innovation Continues – PayShap
For businesses that decide disputes are an acceptable risk, the question shifts from prevention to recovery – how quickly can you get back on track?
The industry hasn’t stood still. PayShap Request to Pay launched on 2 December 2024. It allows businesses to send consumers a pre-populated payment request, ready to approve in whichever banking channel they prefer.
Whether it’s used in a call centre or built into an automated dispute recovery process, PayShap is likely to become a meaningful part of how businesses respond when things go wrong.
Conclusion
This industry has spent the better part of a decade building the tools, the infrastructure, and the consumer awareness needed for exactly this kind of change.
DebiCheck exists precisely to protect legitimate collections. PayShap gives businesses a faster path to recovery when disputes do come in.
And the standardisation of rules removes a layer of complexity that has long been an unnecessary burden for everyone.
Yes, the extended automated window will create short-term pressure for businesses that haven’t modernised their collection approach. But pressure, in this industry, tends to produce innovation.
If the last 10 years are anything to go by, the response will be measured, practical, and faster than most people expect.