“We have called the transaction department of the bank that our company does business with and have been promised that a representative would visit our office to offer technical assistance but so far have not been visited by anyone,” said K. Rowland, a manager at a Centrepoint store in Jeddah.
Other stores, such as HyperPanda which makes frequent requests over the intercom telling customers that only cash would be accepted due to technical problems, claim that it is not the fault of the store or the local bank, but the overall network.
“It is actually the overall transaction network which is faltering, even the banks have been saying this,” said Rami Rajab, marketing director of Panda, adding that the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) needs to be contacted.
He said that even though he is using Saudi credit cards abroad, he has noticed that the service overseas is much faster than what is experienced within the Kingdom.
Customers, upset about the dilemma, say the problem makes shopping difficult. After experiencing embarrassing surprises at the cash registers of stores and restaurants, they have been complying with the cash-only requests.
“I have started to try to carry the cash that I need with me before going shopping because I have noticed a lot of problems in many shops following the floods with most of the stores saying that their transaction system is down,” said Arwa Hussein, a 24-year-old Saudi shopper.
She added that the reason she now carries cash is that she was recently embarrassed at a clothing store at a local mall when she tried to offer her credit card and was told in front of other shoppers that they could only accept cash.
However, in some situations it has also become nearly impossible after the floods to withdraw money.
“Yesterday, I noticed I was short of cash and needed gas so I went to the nearest drive-thru ATM to get the funds. I, however, found that the machine was not working. After that I began to tour the district in search of other ATMs after visiting three drive-thrus all of which had blank screens. I opted to step into a walk-in ATM that was also out of order. Finally, after visiting a total of six ATMs, I finally found one that worked and was able to head to the gas station just in time,” said Omar Abdullah, a father of four.
Currently, the organization in charge of the overall transaction service and ATMs is SAMA, the Kingdom’s central bank. In SAMA’s latest report the organization revealed it had issued 11.7 million ATM cards at the end of 2009.
