Several affected customers voiced their frustration on Twitter (now referred to as "X"), even responding to the bank's pinned Women's Day post. One user stated, "Unauthorized transactions have appeared in my account. Please explain; this is extremely frustrating and causing significant inconvenience." Another individual mentioned, "You have debited my account twice for transactions from the previous weekend. I have a vehicle finance debit order scheduled for tomorrow. The private clients suite attributes it to an FNB error! Please resolve this."
A third user expressed, "FNB, where is my money? You took everything I had and left me with a negative account." Another woke up to notifications for 14 duplicated payments from the previous week. During an interview with 702's Bruce Whitfield, consumer journalist Wendy Knowler remarked that the double deductions seemed to originate from card payments made over the past weekend. She criticized the bank for not publicly acknowledging the issue.
Knowler emphasized that the key aspect lies in the bank's response to the problem rather than the problem itself. Many comments revolved around the bank's lack of communication regarding the issue. "There were no updates on FNB South Africa's X account or the Rb_sa customer care profile." The bank also failed to communicate with affected customers through its mobile app, email, or SMS. The Rb_sa account provided only a generic "copy and paste" response and informed impacted users that direct messages (DMs) had been sent regarding the matter. As of the time of publication, FNB had not issued any official statements on its social media platforms.
Knowler recommended that the bank should lean towards overcommunication when incidents like these occur. "As a bank, you might know that the issue isn't gravely concerning, but for account holders, seeing last week's payments repeated and the resulting reduced balance is highly distressing." She credited the bank's media liaison team for their accessibility during a public holiday when she inquired about the matter directly.
According to Knowler, the team informed her that only a small number of customers were affected, attributing it to incorrectly processed batches of payment files. This suggests that while it appeared the transactions were deducted twice, the second amount wasn't actually removed from customers' accounts, despite being reflected in the balance. However, it remained unclear whether impacted customers with already negative balances would be able to utilize the actual balance in their accounts, or if the transaction would lead to further negative balances.
The liaison recommended that affected customers reach out to the bank through its Secure Chat feature on the mobile app or banking website. The bank assured that the error would be promptly resolved. Nevertheless, based on posts on Twitter/X, several customers had not yet received refunds or corrections to their account balances by Thursday morning. "FNB, it's been over 24 hours, and I need my money back. After years of loyalty, I deserve at least to be informed about when I can expect my money back, and no one is providing any information," one user expressed.
FNB informed MyBroadband that the root cause of the issue had been addressed and that rectifying the affected account balances was in an "advanced" stage. "We have already corrected high-value account balances to ensure customers can fulfill their financial obligations, such as debit orders, and we are currently rectifying the remaining accounts," the bank announced. The bank extended its apologies to those whose accounts were affected by the glitch and promised that any additional fees incurred due to the error would be automatically reversed. While uncommon, instances of duplicate transaction glitches have been reported at several other banks in recent years, including Capitec in 2020 and Standard Bank in 2021.
The last widely documented cases of FNB double-charging occurred in 2016 and 2014.
