“I never received anything.”
It is one of the first things people say when they phone us after a judgment has already been granted. No section 129 letter. No summons. No notice of set down. The first they knew of it was a sheriff at the door, or an attorney’s letter about a sale in execution, or a credit report showing a judgment they cannot explain.
In a large number of those files, the papers were served correctly. They were just served somewhere else. At the flat the person left in 2019. At a parent’s house. At a property that has since been sold. At an address that has been wrong for years, on a credit agreement nobody has looked at since the day it was signed.
That address has a name. It is your domicilium citandi et executandi, and it quietly decides whether you ever see the case that is being run against you.
What a domicilium address actually is
The phrase is Latin and it translates roughly as a home for the purpose of serving summons and levying execution. In plain terms, it is the address you nominated in the contract as the place where the other party may lawfully deliver legal documents to you.
Almost every home loan, vehicle finance agreement, personal loan and credit facility in South Africa contains one. It usually sits in the small print near the end, under a heading like Notices and Domicilium. You filled it in on the day you signed, it was almost certainly where you were living at the time, and you have probably not thought about it since.
Under the National Credit Act, section 96 sets out where legal notice must go. A party giving notice must deliver it to the address of the other party as set out in the agreement, unless a newer address has been provided in accordance with section 96(2). Read that twice. The address in the agreement governs, unless you have replaced it properly.
Service at that address counts, even if you left years ago
This is the part that shocks people, so it is worth being blunt about it.
In Amcoal Collieries Ltd v Truter 1990 (1) SA 1 (A), the Appellate Division confirmed the long standing practice, recognised by rule 4(1)(a)(iv) of the Uniform Rules of Court, that where a defendant has chosen a domicilium citandi, service of process at that place is good service. Good service even if the address is a vacant piece of ground. Good service even if the defendant is living abroad. Good service even if the property has been abandoned, or the defendant simply cannot be found.
The sheriff is not required to track you down. The sheriff is required to serve at the address the law directs. Once the return of service comes back showing service at your chosen domicilium, the court is entitled to proceed on the footing that you were properly notified, whether or not the document ever reached your hands.
So the honest position is this. A wrong address on your file is not a shield. It is a hole in your defence that you dug yourself, and the bank will walk straight through it.
The section 129 letter goes to the same place
Before a credit provider can enforce a credit agreement in court, it must deliver a notice under section 129(1)(a) of the National Credit Act drawing your default to your attention and proposing that you refer the agreement to a debt counsellor, alternative dispute resolution agent, consumer court or ombud. Under section 130(1)(a), you must have been in default for at least 20 business days and at least 10 business days must have passed since that notice was delivered before the credit provider may approach a court.
Since the National Credit Amendment Act 19 of 2014 took effect in March 2015, section 129(5) limits how that notice may be delivered. It must go by registered mail, or be handed personally to an adult at the location you designated. Section 129(7) sets out what the credit provider must produce as proof, including written confirmation from the postal service of delivery to the relevant post office or postal agency.
The Constitutional Court dealt with this in Sebola and Another v Standard Bank of South Africa Ltd 2012 (5) SA 142 (CC) and then in Kubyana v Standard Bank of South Africa Ltd 2014 (3) SA 56 (CC). The effect of those judgments, and of the amendment that followed them, is that the credit provider must take reasonable steps and prove them. It does not have to prove that the letter physically reached you.
Which means the whole enforcement chain, the section 129 letter, the summons, the notice of set down, the warrant, runs to an address you may not have set foot in for years. By the time you find out, the timelines have already run. We deal with that chain in more detail on our Section 129 notice defence page.
What happened in the Munien case
In Marimuthu Munien v BMW Financial Services (SA) (Pty) Ltd, case number 16103/08 in the Durban High Court, a consumer fell into arrears on a vehicle instalment sale agreement. The summons was served at his chosen domicilium. Default judgment was granted in February 2009, including an order for return of the vehicle.
He applied for rescission. His case was that he never received the summons because he no longer lived at that address, and that there was in any event no street delivery of post in that area, so the section 129 notice could never have reached him.
The court dismissed the application. It held that delivery is achieved by sending the notice in the prescribed manner, not by proving receipt. On the facts, the court noted that the consumer was most probably aware of the deficiency in the address, that he should have altered his domicilium when he moved, and that he was entitled to alter it both under the agreement and under section 96 of the National Credit Act. He had also not told the credit provider where the vehicle now was, as section 97 requires. The court found that the consumer was largely to blame for the notice and the summons not coming to his attention.
That reasoning has been followed since. It is not an outlier. It is the standard answer a court gives to a consumer who moved and said nothing.
Section 96(2): how you actually change the address
Here is the part almost nobody uses, and it is sitting in the Act waiting for you.
Section 96(2) of the National Credit Act allows a party to a credit agreement to change their address by delivering to the other party a written notice of the new address. Three methods are specified:
- by hand
- by registered mail
- by electronic mail, where that party has provided an email address
So yes, an email counts. That is not a technicality or a loophole, it is one of the three routes the legislature wrote into the Act. But two things matter enormously in practice.
Send it to an address the credit provider has actually given you. Use the email address printed on your statements, in the agreement, or on the official contact page for that division. An email fired into a general contact centre inbox may well be received, but a year later you want to be able to show a court exactly where it went and why that was the right place.
Keep the proof, and keep it somewhere you will still have it in three years. The sent item, the delivery receipt, the read receipt if you can get one, the registered mail slip and track and trace number, or the stamped duplicate if you hand it in at a branch. The notice is only worth what you can prove about it. Many people do the right thing and then lose the evidence in a phone upgrade.
Our own view is that you should not choose between the three methods. Send the email, then post the same letter by registered mail, and if there is a branch nearby, hand a copy in and have your duplicate stamped. It costs one afternoon. It can be the difference between defending a matter and reading about it on your credit report.
If your agreement is over goods, section 97 adds a hard deadline
Section 96 applies across credit agreements. But where the agreement is over goods, and a vehicle instalment sale agreement is the obvious example, section 97 of the National Credit Act adds a separate obligation on you.
Section 97(2) obliges the consumer to inform the credit provider in writing of any change in residential or business address, and of where the goods are kept. Regulation 34 gives you the deadline and the format: the disclosure must be in writing and delivered to the credit provider within 10 business days after the change, using Form 24, or by providing your name, the reference or account number, the date the change took effect, and the date of the disclosure.
Section 97(3) goes further. The credit provider, the messenger of the court or the deputy sheriff may request that information from you, and Form 25 is the prescribed response.
Note the consequence. On a vehicle matter, failing to update your address is not merely careless. It is a breach of a statutory duty, and a court can and will hold that against you when you stand up months later and say you knew nothing. If your matter concerns a vehicle, our page on stopping vehicle repossession sets out what is still available at each stage.
What changes once you have given notice properly
This is the point of the whole exercise, and it is worth being precise about it, because it is easy to reach for the wrong reason.
The main reason to update your address is so that you receive the documents. Not so that you can build a technical objection later. A consumer who deliberately goes missing and then complains about service is in exactly the position the consumer in Munien was in, and courts see that pattern often. Your defence lives in the merits: reckless lending, a defective section 129 notice, incorrect interest, an unlawful charge, reinstatement, an affordable arrangement. You can only run any of those if the papers reach you in time to instruct someone.
The second reason is real, though, and it is significant. Once you have delivered a valid notice under section 96(2), the position under section 96(1) changes. The credit provider must then deliver legal notice to the address most recently provided by you, not the one in the original agreement. If it goes ahead and serves at the old address anyway, that is a departure from the section, and it is the kind of defect that independent affiliate attorneys can raise squarely in an opposition or a rescission application.
Accuracy also matters at the credit provider’s end. In ABSA Bank Ltd v Prochaska t/a Bianca Cara Interiors 2009 (2) SA 512 (D and CLD), the court held that where a domicilium address has been chosen by the consumer, the credit provider must ensure that the address to which the section 129 notice is sent is similar in every respect to the chosen domicilium address. A section 129 letter sent to a materially different address is not automatically cured by the fact that it was posted.
So the written notice does two jobs at once. It gets the post to you. And if it is ignored, it becomes documentary evidence you did not have before.
What to check this week
Take an hour and do this properly. It applies whether or not you are in arrears.
- Find every credit agreement. Bond, vehicle, personal loan, credit card, store card, overdraft. Each one has its own domicilium clause and its own record of your address.
- Read the notices and domicilium clause in each. Write down the address that appears there. Do not assume they all match. People often have three or four different addresses on file across their credit providers.
- Compare it to where you actually live now. Include unit numbers, complex names, street names, suburb and postal code. A missing unit number is enough to send a registered item to a place it will never be collected from.
- Send a written change of address to every credit provider where it is wrong. By email to their given address, and by registered mail, and by hand if you can. One letter per account, quoting that account number.
- Follow up in writing until you get written confirmation. A call centre reference number is not confirmation. Ask them to confirm in writing that the domicilium address on the account has been updated, and keep that reply.
- File the proof. One folder, physical or on cloud storage, per account. Sent emails, registered slips, track and trace numbers, stamped duplicates, and the confirmation.
- Pull your credit report. If something has already been served at an old address, a judgment or a default listing may already be sitting there. Better to find it now than the week before an auction.
A note on what to write
The notice does not need to be elaborate. It needs to be clear, dated, and specific to the account. Something along these lines:
Change of address in terms of section 96(2) of the National Credit Act 34 of 2005
Account holder: [full name and identity number]. Account or reference number: [number]. Agreement: [home loan, vehicle finance, personal loan].
I hereby give written notice in terms of section 96(2) of the National Credit Act that my address for the delivery of all legal notices under this agreement, and my chosen domicilium citandi et executandi, has changed with effect from [date].
Previous address: [old address in full]. New address: [new address in full, including unit number, complex, street, suburb and postal code].
Please deliver all future notices, statements and legal process to the new address. Kindly confirm in writing that your records have been updated. This notice is delivered by hand, by registered mail and by electronic mail.
If the agreement concerns a vehicle or other goods, add a line stating where the goods are now kept, and send it within 10 business days of the move so that section 97 and regulation 34 are covered at the same time.
If judgment has already been granted
Finding out late is not the same as being out of options, but time now matters more than anything else. Rescission of a default judgment runs on short periods, and the grounds differ depending on whether the matter is in the magistrates’ court or the High Court and on exactly how the judgment came about.
What we would say plainly is that this is not the moment to walk into court alone and explain that you moved. The court is not the place to raise it for the first time, and a payment offer from the bar is not a defence. That is covered in our article on why representing yourself against a bank costs you the merits.
Gather the file instead. The agreement, every statement you have, proof of any address change you sent, your credit report, and whatever court documents you have managed to obtain. Then get it in front of someone who does this every day. If a property is involved, our page on stopping a sale in execution sets out what remains available at each stage, and you can work through your own position first using the Reality Check.
Frequently asked questions
What is a domicilium address?
It is the address you nominated in your credit agreement as the place where legal documents may lawfully be delivered to you. The full term is domicilium citandi et executandi, which means a home for the purpose of serving summons and levying execution. It is usually found in the notices clause near the end of the agreement.
Is service at my old address valid if I no longer live there?
Generally yes. In Amcoal Collieries Ltd v Truter 1990 (1) SA 1 (A) the court confirmed that where a defendant has chosen a domicilium citandi, service at that place is good service even if the property is vacant, abandoned, or the defendant cannot be found. This is recognised by rule 4(1)(a)(iv) of the Uniform Rules of Court.
How do I change my domicilium address with the bank?
Section 96(2) of the National Credit Act allows you to change your address by delivering written notice of the new address to the credit provider by hand, by registered mail, or by electronic mail where an email address has been provided. Quote the account number, state the date the change takes effect, and ask for written confirmation.
Is an email to the bank enough to change my address?
Electronic mail is one of the three methods listed in section 96(2), so an email can be effective. In practice, send it to an email address the credit provider has actually given you rather than a general inbox, keep the sent item and any delivery confirmation, and back it up with registered mail or a stamped duplicate handed in at a branch. The notice is only as strong as the proof you keep of it.
How long do I have to tell the credit provider that I have moved?
Where the credit agreement concerns goods, such as a vehicle instalment sale agreement, section 97(2) of the National Credit Act and regulation 34 require written disclosure within 10 business days after the change, using Form 24 or an equivalent written notice. For other agreements, section 96(2) sets no deadline, but there is no reason to delay.
Does the credit provider have to serve at my new address once I have given it?
Section 96(1) requires legal notice to be delivered to the address in the agreement unless a newer address has been provided under section 96(2). Once you have given valid written notice, the most recently provided address governs. Service at the old address after that would be a departure from the section, which is why keeping proof of your notice matters so much.
Judgment was granted and I never received the summons. What now?
Act immediately, because rescission runs on short time periods. Gather the agreement, your statements, your credit report, any proof of an address change you sent, and every court document you can obtain. Whether rescission is available depends on the court, the grounds, and the facts of how the judgment was obtained, so this should be assessed on your actual documents rather than in general terms.
Check the address before it checks you
Of everything a consumer can do in an afternoon, this is the one with the best return. It costs almost nothing. It requires no permission from anyone. And it removes the single most common reason people arrive at our door with a judgment already granted and the clock already run.
If you are already in arrears, or you have found something on your credit report you cannot explain, do not wait for the next letter. Consumer Credit Law is a specialist consumer credit consultancy acting only for consumers, never for credit providers. We have worked with more than 8,700 clients over more than 20 years, and our team of 10 consultants has helped save 5,655 vehicles and 3,035 homes. Court litigation is conducted by independent affiliate attorneys.
Start with the checklist and quotation, or send us your documents and let us tell you honestly where you stand.
This article is general information about South African consumer credit law and is not advice on your specific matter. Consumer Credit Law is a specialist consumer credit consultancy, not a firm of attorneys. Court litigation is conducted by independent affiliate attorneys.