Reckless Lending in South Africa: What Tribunals Have Found When Affordability Assessments Fail
TL;DR A credit provider with a written affordability assessment policy tends to assume the policy is the protection. The National Consumer Tribunal has repeatedly found otherwise, ruling on what an account file contained rather than what a policy document said should happen. The gap between the two is where reckless lending findings live. Section 80 […]
Debit Order Collection Software and the National Credit Act: What Counts as a Lawful Mandate
TL;DR A credit provider that submits a debit order without the consumer’s own explicit sign-off is leaning on an assumption that used to be legally safe and no longer is. For decades, a bank’s common-law right of set-off let a credit provider treat a customer’s account as recoverable, instruction or no instruction, whenever a balance […]
Running AR Management Software Day to Day: What Changes for a South African Finance Team
TL;DR A finance team does not stop managing receivables once the software starts scoring accounts and timing contact. The work moves. Before automation, the team spends its time finding which accounts need attention. After automation, the system has already found them, and the job becomes reviewing the list, signing off on what it means, and […]
What Collections Software Has to Do for a South African Credit Provider
TL;DR An account gets scored. Now what. That question is where accounts receivable software and its automation boundary hand off to a different system, the one that manages the account day to day. Collections software is that system, and most of what makes one good or bad has nothing to do with how many contact […]
What Gets Automated in Accounts Receivable for a South African Lender
TL;DR Automation gets sold as a single switch. Turn it on, and the whole receivables process runs itself. For a South African bank, NBFC, or insurer, that pitch skips the actual question: which parts of the process should run without a person, and which parts should not. Accounts receivable software covers what the underlying system […]
What Accounts Receivable Software Has to Do for a South African Bank or Insurer
TL;DR Type “accounts receivable software” into Google from a South African bank’s collections desk and most of what comes back is built for the wrong job. QuickBooks, Sage, and a page of listicle directories answer a business finance team’s question: how do we get customers to pay their invoices faster. That is not the question […]
NCR Enforcement Priorities 2026: What AI Collections Risks SA Credit Providers Face
An Automated System Doesn’t Make One Reckless Lending Mistake. It Can Make the Same Mistake Across an Entire Portfolio Before Anyone Notices. TL;DR The scale of financial pressure in South Africa’s credit market is stark: NCR data shows more than 42% of the country’s roughly 23 million credit-active consumers are considered impaired, in arrears for […]
Prescription of Debt and AI Collections: Why Continuing to Collect on a Prescribed Account Is a Legal Risk, Not Just a Wasted Call
More Contact Isn’t Always Better. Sometimes It’s the Event That Either Resets a Clock You Wanted Left Alone, or Proves You’re Chasing Money You Have No Right to Chase. TL;DR Most collections logic runs on a simple assumption: more contact, applied earlier and more consistently, produces better recovery outcomes. Under South African prescription law, that […]
POPIA Non-Compliance Cost: Information Regulator Penalties vs Governance Investment
The Information Regulator Has Already Fined R5 Million and Issued a Public Notice Against WhatsApp. This Isn’t a Hypothetical Risk Anymore. TL;DR For years, POPIA carried real statutory teeth on paper but limited visible enforcement in practice, which made it easy to treat governance investment as something to defer. That’s no longer a defensible read […]
Business Rescue and AI Collections: Recovering from Distressed SA SME Portfolios
Business Rescue Success Rates Just Hit 66%, and Small Companies Preserve More Value Through It Than Large Ones Do TL;DR The instinct with an SME account heading toward business rescue is often to treat it as effectively lost, a legal process the credit provider has limited influence over and modest expectation of recovery from. The […]
