‘Where’s my salary?’ Standard Bank customers voice frustration over delayed salaries

The Standard Bank call centre experienced high call volumes on Friday morning as customers asked why their salaries were not reflecting in their accounts.

Some customers, who typically receive their salaries on the 25th, did not see the funds in their Standard Bank accounts on pay day.

Many took to social media to vent their anger and frustration.

“What in the world is happening with Standard Bank, people haven’t received their salaries, I’m one of those people. Being a Standard Bank customer is starting to be a huge risk,” said Siphokazi Malinga on X (formally Twitter).

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Delays

An enquiry to the Standard Bank call centre by The Citizen revealed it had been flooded with calls at 6am notifying customers of “high call volumes”.

Standard Bank spokesperson Ross Linstrom told The Citizen they investigated the issue and did experience a problem.

“Standard Bank can confirm that there was a slight delay in processing salary transactions this morning. We can confirm that all payments scheduled for today were completed just after 6am. We apologise for the inconvenience that this has caused,” said the bank.

Security breach

In July, the bank was adamant that there was no security breach in its systems, despite numerous customer complaints.

“We can confirm there hasn’t been a security breach specific to any of our systems or anything that we saw in 2021. However, what we saw this month-end is an increase in fraud activity as fraudsters try and target clients at the month-end because they know there’s money in the customers’ accounts and there’s many fraud modus operandi we tend to see and block those without even customers knowing,” Standard Bank’s chief risk officer for personal and private banking Thabani Ndwandwe said.

“The fraud modus operandi that came through was one that required us to contact customers and many of the clients would’ve received communication from us because we saw those transactions coming through and all our control systems and security systems worked and alerted us, contacted clients and let them know.” 

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