I am a wholesale merchant in Texas. I had Texas Bank (never a problem) until Compass took over. At the first of 2008 I had a hot check written to me from a company in california. Compass delayed in notifying me. I went down to the branch myself to find out why my account was in overdraft. At the time we did not have online banking, also at the same time i had a company illegally using my debit card number. Compass told me they could do nothing about the illegal use of my debit card number that I would have to contact the company myself to stop this abuse which I did but had to still pay the INF charges with Compass, The company that was abusing the use of my debit already had a class action suit against them for abuse but Compass was not interested in my findings just wanted the INF charges' but back to my overdrafted account. I soon found out about Compass's deposit posting after 5:00 only policy. It was in a banking nightmare trying to keep my head above water. My company is a wholesale design company. All of our sales are online credit card sales. It is not unusual for me to have 15 debits a day in my account. Soon we had racked up over 4000.00 dollars in check charges even though I always had a deposit waiting to be posted on the same day. I sometimes even had a large deposit I had from visiting shops sales I would deposit as early as 7:00 am and then have a automatic draft come in several hours later and they would still charge me. You might ask why in the world did you not change banks? It is not easy for a merchant like me. I have much of my bills set up on automatic drafts and also with most of our sales coming in by the merchant account it just was not that easy. Also I was working 12 hours a day trying to keep up. Compass contacted me to see if I wanted to use them to process my credit card transactions. I was using a different credit card processing company and Compass assured me they could offer me a better deal and get my deposits in overnite so I said ok. We have used Compass the past few months everything going fine until a week ago tuesday. We received a large order from one of our regular customers. This customer always orders around the same amount. It is an expensive order to do. We completed the order called the customer to tell him we would be charging his credit card. He gave us the ok to charge the card. We charged his card it was approved as always and transmitted to our account the next business day and posted as an available balance. We have online banking with compass. I wrote my payroll checks. My employees went thru the drive thru window and cashed their checks. Next morning I come in and my account is overdrawn. Compass had taken it upon themselves to take this large deposit (over 3000.00) out of my account without even the courtesy of a phone call. There reason, none actually except it WAS NOT because the customer disputed it. They wanted more info which I provided. He after all was one of our oldest customers never a problem with his credit card. My account was going into severe overdraft. They did not care. They kept telling me they were going to put the funds back into my account and credit the fees. I told them to call my customer. They would not. They would not call us back. We most of the time had to call them. We called our local branch which did side with us and was working very hard to get us our funds back. The reason they finally gave us was that we had a 2000.00 limit on what we could charge. I was not told this when we signed up with compass.in fact I made it very clear we could not have a limit and had to fill out extra paperwork to prevent it. We do have a signed contract they keep throwing up to us that says average sale assumptions to be between 300 but nowhere does it state a limit. To end this nightmare story I have a very expensive to produce wholesale order that cannot be paid for. Compass will not even let me charge 2000.00 on this customer or let him put it on 2 separate cards or pay for it in 30 day intervals. I am a good merchant with no negative reports on my business. My customer has a perfectly good card approved as always. What do I do. The customer wants the merchandise charged to his card. I do have my old merchant account still active but has not been used since i started using Compass. However Compass informed me I could not use my old merchant account because it is illegal to have 2 merchant accounts. Is this true? I had close to 900.00 worth of Inf fees because of this. My branch did refund 683.00 due to the district manager getting involved and the hard work of another caring individual in my branch. I feel all my check charges should be refunded. All this stress and major problems to my small business. Why? What can I do? Any suggestions out there? I am tired of being stepped on by Compass Bank. I do not feel like we did anything wrong. Is there no justice for the little guy?
0 comments