Why do we need your personal reference codes on your payments so hardly?
It’s a big question for everyone joining the SOL Platform — why my money are not credited to the SOL balance after I paid 2 days ago? This can be scary and this can frustrate anyone. But in most cases the reason is simple — it is caused by the missing personal reference code on the incoming payment. So we decided to explain you how it works.
A bank account is actually nothing but an address used by the banks to send, receive and allocate your money properly to your customer profile. When you send money from your bank account to a friend’s bank account in another bank, a national payment system uses the bank branch code to find which bank holds your friend’s profile, and sends it there. And the recipient’s bank uses the destination account number to match it with your friend’s profile and allocate the money to him.
Looks simple, isn’t it? So why I’m not getting my money send to SOL account?
SOL is not a bank. We’re a tech company which helps you to manage your money, payments and card very effectively via a mobile app. And your SOL profile is not an individual bank account. When you send bank or cash payment to any SOL profile, you actually send it to SOL company account. And there is only one way to let us know that the money is sent to a specific person — to put a unique number there, which will help us to match it with the customer profile and credit its’ balance.
In SOL, we use personal reference numbers as personal addresses to allocate your money to your SOL profiles. The reference numbers are generated by SOL Platform when you complete the identity verification. They are unique for your SOL profile, and they are made different for ATM cash topups and EFT transfers. EFT reference number stays with you forever — and you’re able to receive your salary over and over again every month, not changing your payment details in the employer’s system. But the ATM reference numbers live some short time, like 24 hours, and are changing before every ATM transaction — that is required by the Reserve Bank for the safety reasons.
When SOL Platform receives any payment, it checks the reference code in this payment, and finds the same code in the list of customer profiles. This is how we know that the money are paid to Mr. Khumalo, but not to Mr. Mthembu. But if the reference code is not added to the payment — SOL Platform has no idea whos’ money are that.
Because of the nature of such transactions, it takes us some manual work in a close cooperation with the bank to release such payments and allocate it to your balances. Let us explain you how it works.
As you now understand, we need to know who was the recipient of the unallocated payment. So we need the payer to contact us in Chat with the proofs of the payment done, and the correct reference number to allocate the money to it. Then we have to contact the bank, check all payments there, find the erroneous one, correct the routing address (the reference number) in it, and finally bank releases the money to SOL after all the internal checks. It takes 1–2 business days to do all this, and do you remember that the banks are not working in holidays and weekends? So, if you have sent some money on Wednesday, but then you have realized on Thursday that you missed to put the reference code and contacted us with payment proofs only on Thursday — your money may be allocated to your SOL balance next Monday. Isn’t it way much longer than the usual 2 hours when the reference code is there?
We hope it explains you why adding your personal reference code into payments to SOL profiles is so important, and how it helps you to get money into your balances in a quickest possible and automated way.
To find your EFT reference code for salary and other incoming EFT payments — tap Topup / EFT in your SOL app.
To find your ATM reference code for cash payments — tap Topup / ATM. And don’t forget that it changes with every transaction.
