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

Stephen Grootes is joined by consumer journalist Wendy Knowler on The Money Show.

This week on The Money Show, Wendy Knowler investigates why Standard Bank clients are still unwittingly paying the bank R100 a month as a service fee on garage cards they stopped using many years ago.

It's an issue the consumer ninja first raised with Standard more than six months ago, in August 2024.

RELATED: Could you be paying service fees on cards you or your partner have not used for years?

Sketching the context, she notes that it became legal to buy fuel with 'regular' bank cards way back in mid-2009.

"While some of the bank’s garage card holders continued to use them to pay for fuel - mostly for accounting purposes - many others just stopped using them. 
But they failed to instruct their banks to cancel them. And now it’s costing them R100 a month."

Wendy Knowler, Consumer Journalist

Why are so many people missing this charge on their bank statements?

It’s because the R100 is lumped in with the card fees associated with their regular credit card.

Nowhere do the words 'Garage card fee: R100' appear, Knowler says.

When she suggested last year that itemising garage card fees on clients’ credit card statements would alert those who hadn’t used their cards for years that they were still being charged, Standard said it was working on 'changing the manner in which the fees are reflected on client statements' and would implement this 'in the coming months'.

"By December, four months later, that had yet to happen...  But the bank did commit to an 'expected' implementation date of “Quarter 1, 2025.” In other words, by the end of March."

Wendy Knowler, Consumer Journalist

However, when Knowler followed up at the end of March, she found that the bank is still not itemising that fee on clients' statements.

'The statement narrative has not yet been implemented due to unforeseen technical challenges', she was told.

The consumer journo checked again today (7 May 2025), after an appeal for help from a consumer who found out her 85-year-old parents are still paying the R100 fee for an unused garage card.

Jennifer told Knowler that she queried this with the bank and suggested they needed to refund her parents for at least the past few years.

"I was told that we should have cancelled the card and that the fee is only cancelled after the client calls in. This is crazy. They have been charging for years, for a card that they are not even providing.”
Jennifer

Knowler says that Standard has been refunding clients who ask, usually 50% of the fees going back three years.

"I asked if Standard Bank ever did an analysis of its clients’ supplementary cards – both garage and secondary cards, for spouses, for example - in order to contact those who hadn’t used them in the previous year and ask if they wished to cancel. To my mind it's particularly pertinent in the case of garage cards, I said, given that it’s been 16 years now since South Africans needed a specific card in order to buy fuel on credit.”

Wendy Knowler, Consumer Journalist

"Yes, the bank did, I was told. 'But customers are not always contactable'."

Wendy Knowler, Consumer Journalist

To hear more detail, listen to the interview audio at the top of the article