Bank finally takes action over forgotten, fee-guzzling garage cards

Remember the old 'garage cards' that one used to buy fuel at petrol stations?

Well, consumer ninja Wendy Knowler's long-running battle to get Standard Bank specifically to be transparent about the fees being charged for these cards which people have generally forgotten about while unknowingly paying for them, has finally come to an end.

Except that the bank didn't inform her about the changes they've implemented.

She reminds us that after 2009, South Africans were able to use any debit or credit card at the pumps, so many stopped using their garage cards but didn't think to cancel them.

And in 2015, Standard Bank began charging a fee for a secondary card like the garage card, to cover "the cost of providing, administrating and maintaining all the value-added services and features associated with the card", bearing in mind as Knowler says, that thousands of them were no longer being used at all.

This fee had escalated to R100 a month by 2024 - equivalent to the monthly fee levied on the bank's top credit card, she points out. And when it came to renewal the bank stayed quiet, simply bundling the R100 in with the fee for the ordinary credit card.

It was in August 2024 that Knowler first approached Standard about the issue, with the bank saying they would get to it as resolving the issue entailed some technical complexity.

"This carried on, with people still writing to me that they'd found out by accident after paying thousands for years, and they'd maybe get 50% back of three years' fees."

RELATED: Utterly mind-boggling!: Wendy Knowler takes bank to task for still not detailing unused garage card fees on statements

The last story Knowler wrote about this issue was in December 2025, featuring a Porterville couple who'd been paying a combined R200 a month for unused cards since 2012.

It was only last week that the consumer journo found out from the bank that they'd actually started taking action in early 2025, a few months after Knowler had started pressing them on the issue.

Standard told Knowler that by September 2025 fees were stopped for 90% of customers in the cases where they hadn't used their garage cards for over a year.

"They reviewed the legacy products they told me, and saw that most clients weren't using the card - something I could have told them, and that they acted in the customer's best interest even though the contracts were still valid and people hadn't cancelled them."

That means 10% of the clients with garage cards are still left, and they either have balances they need to pay or they are still actually using the cards.

Why didn't Standard tell her this!, she exclaims: "If you'd told me in December, that column would have looked a bit different!"

The main thing though, is that the issue has FINALLY been addressed, she says, after the bank had been earning millions every month in fees that clients were actually paying for nothing.

"For me it's a pretty big deal and I'm really happy it's finally happened... I hadn't been able to believe how they kicked the can down the road and had such 'difficulty' including the fee on statements..."

For more detail on this garage card saga, listen to the conversation with Wendy Knowler in the interview audio at the top of the article