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The South African Post Office has completed upgrades to its social grants IT system – in time for the end-of-July payments cycle.
Following system glitches during the July payment to grant beneficiaries, the Social Security Agency has assured beneficiaries that August will be smooth sailing.
“Our IT systems are ready for the upcoming month-end payments and we are confident that social grant beneficiaries will witness a smooth payments experience,” Post Office chief operating officer Lindiwe Kwele said.
Kwele said technicians had been working tirelessly with industry stakeholders since the beginning of the month to optimise the post office’s transaction capacity.
“Infrastructure upgrades have also been implemented on Postbank’s connectivity to Bankserv to improve transaction speeds,” she said.
The post office said the upgrades will allow the Post Office sufficient capacity to process grant payments transaction volumes involving social beneficiaries who had migrated to the new gold Social Security Agency card.
“The IT improvements that Post Office has made have increased its processing capacity to better than 160 transactions per second – an improvement of more than 700%, and in line with banking industry standards,” the post office said.
The new gold card that is tailored to prevent illegal deductions on social grants, and social grants beneficiaries can use it to make ATM and merchant cash withdrawals, free retail merchant purchases as well as to withdraw cash over the counter inside a Post Office.
Beneficiaries who switched to the new gold card will have their grant money credited into the accounts at midnight on July 31. The new card won’t work at the old pay-points where they were previously paid in cash.
The Social Security Agency is also in the process of rationalising its pay-points, and some of them may be decommissioned.
The Post Office said the old white Social Security Agency card would expire at the end of September and beneficiaries should use the limited time left to switch to the new one.
In July the system got marred by system glitches that affected 700 000 of the 12 million beneficiaries
The problem affected beneficiaries who used the new Social Security Agency gold card, and payments were delayed.
“At the moment the infrastructure linking Post Office and the Bankserv payment clearing house has been massively optimised. The line speed used by Post Office to process transactions now has the capacity to process 160 transactions a second,” said the Social Security Agency.
• Beneficiaries with queries can contact the Social Security Agency toll free on 0800 60 10 11 or get hold of the agency on social media.– SAnews.gov.za
