SAMAR announces plans to cover entire life-cycle of all assets currently excluded from registration on the Electronic National Traffic Information System (eNaTIS)
MIDRAND – 7 December 2016 – The Southern African Movable Asset Register (SAMAR) today announces its plans that will allow manufacturers, importers, builders, banks, insurers as well as the general public to control title and ownership of all movable assets. At present, many movable assets are currently not allowed to be loaded on eNaTIS (the Electronic National Traffic Information System) due to requirements from the Department of Transport.
However, SAMAR has created a system that creates the most recent reliable record of an asset by updating records in real-time as changes are made by various system participants. This allows banks, insurance companies and the general public to effectively manage and control the financing of all assets throughout the lifecycle. This greatly reduces fraud, double discounting, or incorrect depiction of value for insurance purposes.
Benefits for general public
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Information is readily available as to whom owns the assets and the history of ownership, for example is the asset still subject to finance, has it been reported stolen, etc.
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The value of movable assets financed and insured, is substantial and the risks of double financing and fraud requires additional control.
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The identification of these assets in instances where the purchaser owing, and/or in instances of loss due to theft, is problematic for both financier and insurer.
Kyle Dutton, Project Manager at SAMAR commented, “SAMAR will greatly reduce risk and related costs. This is extremely valuable, as unfortunately millions of Rands are lost each year due to multiple financing on the same asset – mostly due to lack of the marking of movable assets other than roadworthy and registered vehicles. SAMAR was created to enable all parties involved to easily identify and confirm ownership, and allows both the financier and the insurer to be able to have access to a database where the owner could be linked to the specific asset in question, similar to what e-NATIS does in the registered motor environment.”
About SAMAR
Regulation 5 of the National Road Traffic Act of 1996 (Act 93 of 1996) regulates that certain motor vehicles are not allowed to be registered on to the National Traffic Information System (eNaTIS). In 2011 the Inter Provincial Policy and Procedural (IPPP) committee, instructed the NRCS to adhere to legislation and stop providing eNaTIS model numbers for those vehicles prescribed in Regulation 5. The vehicles so prescribed are vehicles not designed for public road use, in other words, vehicles that cannot legally pass a roadworthy test. In the bank’s controls suites, the use of “title” on a eNaTIS Registration Document is utilised as the confirmation of the bank’s interest in the asset. Therefore by denying access to eNaTIS for such assets the ability of applying “title” (on mainly “yellow metal”) had effectively been withdrawn. This brought about the development of SAMAR at the request of several of the banks and importers of “yellow metal” assets as a practical solution to the impasse created, however this was not formalised across all the entities and assets involved, essentially this was a stop gap measure. Today the risk officials at several of the institutions involved have asked for the use of SAMAR to be agreed across the industry.