- POPIA
- The Protection of Personal Information Act, South Africa's data protection law. POPIA governs how letting agencies, property managers, and any other responsible party collect, use, store, and delete personal information - including tenant ID numbers, payslips, and bank statements. Compliance turns on having a lawful purpose, telling the data subject what you are collecting and why, retaining only what you need, and being able to delete on request.
- FIC Act
- The Financial Intelligence Centre Act 38 of 2001, South Africa's anti-money-laundering and counter-terror-financing law. The FIC Act lists the businesses that count as Accountable Institutions and obliges them to run client due diligence (collectively known as FICA), keep records, and file suspicious transaction reports.
- FICA
- The verification process required by the FIC Act: confirming a client's identity, address, and (where relevant) source of funds, beneficial ownership, and Politically Exposed Person status. In SA real estate, FICA applies to every party to a residential lease (tenant, guarantor, landlord) and to property sales (buyer, seller, related parties).
- FIC Act Schedule 1
- The schedule to the FIC Act that lists the businesses recognised as Accountable Institutions. In a property context the list includes residential letting agencies, property managers, transfer attorneys handling conveyancing, and sales estate agents on certain transactions. If you appear in Schedule 1 you have to do FICA.
- Accountable Institution
- A business listed in Schedule 1 of the FIC Act that has to run FICA on its clients, keep the records for at least five years, and report suspicious transactions to the Financial Intelligence Centre. Letting agencies and property managers are Accountable Institutions; body corporates often inherit the duty in practice.
- NCA
- The National Credit Act 34 of 2005. The NCA regulates credit in South Africa and, for residential leases, requires a reasonable assessment of the tenant's ability to meet the rent. This is why letting agencies collect payslips and bank statements and why minimum income ratios (commonly three times the rent) are standard.
- TPN
- The Tenant Profile Network. TPN is the dominant credit and rental-payment-history bureau for South African residential rentals. Letting agencies submit a tenant's details to TPN to retrieve a screening report; they also report payment behaviour back so the bureau's data stays current. TPN sits alongside the application flow - LetSignal collects and packages the application, TPN runs the screening.
- Beneficial Ownership
- The natural person who ultimately owns or controls a corporate or trust applicant. For a company the test is usually a defined shareholding threshold; for a trust it is the founder, the trustees, and the named beneficiaries. The FIC Act requires Accountable Institutions to look through the corporate veil and verify the natural persons behind the legal entity.
- PEP (Politically Exposed Person)
- A person who holds (or held in the recent past) a prominent public office, or a close family member or known associate of one. The FIC Act requires Accountable Institutions to identify PEPs and apply enhanced due diligence to them. For a standard residential lease this is usually a yes-or-no declaration on the application form.
- Application Pack
- The complete artefact a letting agency hands to a screener or owner once a tenant submits an application: the structured Application Report PDF (every captured field), the Combined Report covering household members, and a ZIP of every uploaded document. The pack is what makes a tenant application defensible and ready for TPN.
- Subject Access Request
- A formal request by a data subject (such as a tenant or unsuccessful applicant) under POPIA, asking the responsible party to confirm what personal information they hold about them, provide a copy of it, and correct or delete it. A defensible answer requires being able to retrieve every field, document, and audit-trail entry tied to the data subject in one query.
- Affordability Ratio
- The relationship between rent and the tenant's net household income, used to decide whether a residential lease is viable under the National Credit Act's affordability requirements. The convention in South African letting is that net household income should be at least three times the rent. The ratio is normally calculated on the application form so it is visible in the Application Report.