Complaint Review: Processing.com

Processing.com (also going by Global Payment Solutions) offers online credit card processing services to online merchants. Like many merchant processors, they have relationships with multiple underwriting banks. In the case of Processing.com, they had a relationship with a EU/Bulgarian bank, which they used to board their credit card processing customers through, and received a % of the revenue transacted as a"middle man" fee.

Unfortunately, Processing.com lost their relationship with their European underwriting bank, and notified all of their related merchant customers that they would no longer be able to service them. At this time, Processing.com and/or its banking subsidiaries were holding funds owed to their clients from credit transactions that had been processed prior to the notice of closure. Instead of releasing the funds that were owed to their processing clients (including our company), Processing.com, through their Chief Revenue Officer James Bergman, elected instead to retain those funds, in clear violation of their own Merchant Processing Agreement signed with each and every one of their clients. This is not only a terrible way to treat customers that were already negatively affected by Processing.com's inability to maintain their own banking relationships, but is also a violaton of several state and federal banking laws.

While Processing.com would have a legal right to hold certain funds (known as "reserve accounts" in the industry) under their MPA agreements for a period of up to 180 days, they would have no legal right to hold funds that were not subject to such reserves. These funds represent credit card transacations processed successfully by the merchants for their online customers, and are the property of the merchant, NOT Processing.com or Mr Bergman. A unilateral decision to simply refuse to release these funds is unethical, and grounds for civil lawsuits from each and every merchant affected against Processing.com.

If you are considering using Processing.com, please reconsider as, at the first sign of internal problems with their own banking relatinships, their preferred course of action there seems to be seizing the deposited funds of the clients they are supposed to be serving (for an inderterminate length of time), in violation of their own legal agreements.