kredcor
White Papers
White Paper 7 -
The B2B Creditor's Guide to Prescription — When South African Debt Expires
Prescription is one of the most legally consequential — and most neglected — concepts in South African commercial credit law. Under the Prescription Act 68 of 1969, a debt that is not collected, acknowledged, or litigated within three years of becoming due is extinguished by operation of law. It does not become harder to collect. It ceases to exist as an enforceable obligation. Yet the 2026 Kredcor Annual Survey found that 64% of South African businesses have lost at least one commercial claim to prescription in the past five years. The total estimated value of prescribing B2B debt in South Africa exceeds R4.7 billion per year — virtually all of it avoidable.
White Paper 8 -
Business Rescue vs Liquidation: A Creditor's Survival Manual
When a key commercial debtor becomes financially distressed, the South African creditor faces one of the most complex decisions in business law: understand the process their debtor is entering, act quickly, and position their claim correctly — or risk losing everything to a creditor who moved faster. Business rescue and liquidation are the two primary insolvency regimes under South African law. They are fundamentally different in purpose, process, timeline, and outcome for creditors.
White Paper 9 -
POPIA and Debt Collection in South Africa
A definitive analysis of the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 as it applies to B2B creditors, credit managers, and registered debt collectors — covering lawful bases for processing debtor data, POPIA obligations throughout the collection lifecycle, cross-border data transfers, the Information Regulator, and building a defensible POPIA compliance programme.The Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA) came into full force on 1 July 2021. Since then, every South African business that processes personal information — including the personal information of commercial debtors — has been subject to its eight conditions for lawful processing. Yet the majority of South African B2B creditors and debt collectors have not fully implemented POPIA-compliant collection practices.
White Paper 4 -
Interest on Overdue Debt in South Africa:
The In Duplum Rule
Interest on overdue debt is one of the most legally complex and commercially consequential areas of South African credit law. Yet it is also one of the most poorly understood.
Many South African businesses unknowingly charge unlawful interest rates, apply fees that breach the in duplum rule, or fail to enforce contractual interest rights they are legitimately entitled to — losing hundreds of thousands of Rands in the process.
White Paper 5 -
The State of Commercial Debt in South Africa Annual Bad Debt & Recovery Rate Report 2026
The 2026 Kredcor Annual Report on the State of Commercial Debt in South Africa is our fifth annual examination of this phenomenon.
This year, the findings are sobering. Bad debt as a proportion of revenue has increased across every sector we track. Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) is rising.
Recovery rates in rural and semi-urban provinces are declining. And the economic pressure on South African businesses — from inflation, load shedding legacy costs, rising interest rates, and a constrained consumer — is translating directly into a deteriorating payment culture.
White Paper 6 -
How to Vet and Appoint Debt Collectors in South Africa
Appointing the wrong debt collector is one of the most expensive mistakes a South African business can make.
The consequences range from lost recoveries and damaged client relationships, to legal liability, POPIA breaches, and reputational harm that can take years to repair.
Yet the 2026 Kredcor Annual Survey reveals a startling disconnect: while 91% of South African businesses say CFDC registration is “very important” when appointing a debt collector, only 38% actually verify it before signing a mandate.
White Paper 1 -
The Liquidation Pressure Playbook
South African businesses do not need a panic narrative. They need a clear-eyed operating framework.
The current environment is not defined by one dramatic statistic alone.
It is defined by persistent pressure: fragile growth, uncertain inflation, elevated financing costs relative to recent years, delayed payments, operational bottlenecks, and thin margins.
In that environment, credit risk rarely arrives as a single catastrophic event.
It arrives as a sequence of small warnings: a broken promise to pay, a sudden dispute over an old invoice, a fragmented payment, an unusual request for more time, or silence from the accounts department that used to respond in minutes.
White Paper 2 -
The 90-Day Cliff
A late invoice is rarely just an invoice.
In a low-growth, cost-sensitive operating environment, overdue B2B debt changes the economics of a transaction long before it becomes legally hopeless.
Cash that should be funding operations, tax, payroll, inventory, and growth gets trapped in a debtor ledger instead.
This paper makes a disciplined argument: age matters, but age alone is not the whole story.
What really damages the creditor is the interaction between time, uncertainty, management drag, financing cost, and margin replacement pressure.
That is why a 90-day debt often feels worse than its face value suggests.
White Paper 3 -
Cash Flow as Strategy
Accounts receivable is often treated as a finance process, but in practice it is a strategy system.
It determines how quickly revenue turns into cash, how much management attention is consumed by old debt, how much avoidable funding pressure builds in the business, and how much risk is allowed to concentrate in a few customers or sectors.
For South African financial leaders, that strategic view matters even more in a low-growth, cost-sensitive environment.
The South African Reserve Bank kept the policy rate at 6.75% in early 2026, while its April 2026 Monetary Policy Review projected growth of about 1.4% and inflation of about 3.7% for the year. At the same time, National Treasury’s supplier-payment reporting continued to show material late-payment pressure in the wider system.
In that environment, weak receivables discipline is not a back-office inconvenience. It is a direct threat to liquidity quality.
We can effectively assist you with your outstanding debt, and so improve your cash flow and minimise your credit risk.