Pretoria - Money has gone from your account, but the bills haven’t been paid.
This is the frustration of a customer of EasyPay, a payment intermediary, who claims the system has become unsatisfactory. “I’ve used EasyPay for the last 20 years,” said Brian Gishen.
“It was beautiful until about two years ago, now it’s all upside down.”
He uses EasyPay online to settle his accounts, including water and electricity bills, for his publishing company which produces a small community magazine.
For the past four months he has had several payments to such accounts fail on the EasyPay system and the company’s solution was to simply try again, while it took three business days for a refund.
“I’m supposed to try again and find the funds elsewhere, and there’s no guarantee that it’s going to work the second time around,” he said.
Gishen contacted the EasyPay call centre to be told his payments had failed because of a connection problem between it and account holders.
“Now I’m going to the trouble of individually paying those merchants, in other words, the whole thing is useless,” Gishen said.
Dr Serge Belamant – the chief executive of EasyPay’s holding company, Net1 UEPS Technologies Incorporated – did not respond to Independent Newspapers’ requests for comment.
Since October, four people have taken to consumer watch website Hello Peter to complain about failed transactions over EasyPay.
One user, only identified as randy_al, said his electricity was cut off last Friday even though he had paid his eThekwini Municipality bill via EasyPay.
“According to the (municipal) transaction history, I had not paid the account, but when I checked my bank statement, my account had in fact been debited with the amount,” he wrote.
“Eventually I went to the municipality and paid the amount myself. EasyPay has my money and still no response.”
The company did reply via the Hello Peter website, saying: “We will escalate your query to the call centre and one of our consultants will contact you shortly.” - Pretoria News