# IA — Capitec Business payment reference limits

- Capitec Business may **reject special characters** in the payment reference and enforce a **short max length (~18 characters)**.
- Long AM stems like `AM1-JD7263-JOHANG-8` with hyphens can be mangled — tell client the bank-safe truncated form before they pay.
- First seen batch 9: Gebrateq Johan Braasch POP (`19f8e453e28c53b3`).
- Pair with wrong-ref remap IA when bank truncates.