27,000 Quicken bill pay accounts activated in error during move from Checkfree to Metavante?
I have not yet confirmed Metavante employee Mathias Johnson’s allegations, here is an excerpt from his e-mail:
“In a nutshell: over 27,000 consumer accounts were activated in error during the migration from CheckFree to Metavante. This is a single KNOWN issue among who knows how many other known issues that caused the unintended activation of tens of thousands of accounts.
We have been billing these people $9.95 or $12.95 each month since September 2004.
A coworker & I in the Research Department have worked a special project to process refunds for these monthly fees.
In October, I suggested ways by which we could determine which customers had accounts that were unintentionally activated, but I was told that we wouldn’t move on that kind of initiative due to revenue reasons (that is, we got $9.95 a month from thousands of people and provided no services in return).
I have kicked this up the chain of command many times since then & caused a stink about what I consider an immoral issue. My coworker & I have recently been taken off of the project; it has been assigned to someone else.
Intuit has flat-out refused to return any of these monies (that is, they will not reimburse Metavante for providing refunds when a consumer calls to complain about being billed despite never signing up for the service), and today a policy was made known to us: Metavante has decided that these customers have been billed long enough to constitute tacit consent. If someone calls to request the return of their monthly fees, we will not provide more than 3 months of fees as company policy.”
If you find these charges on your statements and even if you already got your credit, please post here.
If Mathias’ allegations can be documented by consumers, a class action on behalf of all the consumers ought to be filed and the U.S. AG or *one* state AG should prosecute Metavante and Intuit for CRIMINAL fraud.
Willfully charging credit cards without authorization is no different than what the credit card traders are doing after stealing the numbers and data. If this is proven, the people in charge ought to spend time at the Grey Bar Hotel.
I don’t think consumers should complain with 50 different state AGs (wasting resources on redundant investigations) or that the FTC should settle for a partial refund with no admission of any wrong doing - as they usually do.
How are these accounts billed, are Metavante, Quicken or Intuit identified on the statements?
20,000 accounts at $10 each gets you $200,000/month for doing nothing.
I had never even heard of Metavante before, did a little research at http://www.metavante.com and searched for Quicken, from the Metavante 2004 Annual Review:
“November 16, 2004: Intuit Inc., a leading provider of business and financial management solutions for small and mid-sized businesses, consumers and accounting professionals, migrates the majority of its Quicken® Bill Pay® customers to Metavante’s online management application, Bill Manager V6.”
Active Statement / Web Connect Support: provides the institution’s Personal Financial Management (PFM) users to download their cleared transactions from Consumer eBanking accounts directly into Microsoft Money or Intuit Quicken via streamlined processes.
Metavante-Zions Deal Shows EBPP Turning into Commodity
American Banker Jan 26—by Steve Bills
With its online bill payment and presentment contract expiring, Zions Bancorp. of Salt Lake City is switching from CheckFree Corp., the market leader, to the runner-up, Metavante Corp.
The selling point, a Zions executive said, was not features - on which providers of electronic billing service have been competing for years - but price. And that signals a big shift.
“Metavante will provide the same exact service that CheckFree was,” said Michael DeVico, Zions’ executive vice president of technology and operations and chief information officer. “From a feature/function standpoint, we expect no significant customer impact.”
The change “was primarily driven by economics,” Mr. DeVico said.
Frank D’Angelo, a senior executive vice president at Metavante and the group executive of its payments solutions group, said Tuesday that the Zions contract was the biggest win it has revealed in bill payment.
Metavante, the technology subsidiary of the Milwaukee banking company Marshall & Ilsley Corp., entered the bill-payment market in 2002 by buying a foundering Spectrum EBP LLC.
Mr. DeVico emphasized that he was not unhappy with CheckFree - “They’ve done a good job for us,” he said - but said price could not be ignored. ...”
URL e-mailed for comments to Investor and Public Relations, Chip Swearngan
Update 7/1/05 PM: I have NOT received a response to my e-mail. I called to ensure that he received it, according to his VM he was out Friday afternoon.
Posted by Christine on 07/01/2005 at 02:44 AM
Credit - Collection - Economic News • Quicken Bill Pay - Metavante • (2) Comments • Permalink
To my knowledge, a bank statement indicates “Quicken Bill Pay” but does not provide a means of contacting the company. For the record: the Quicken customer service phone number is 877-486-8844. It has now been decided that any consumer will only get _one_ month refunded, no matter how long the billing has occurred.
I do want to point out that there are cases in which the billings are technically legal even if the service was never used. If you sign up for the free month of service, you will later be billed $9.95 or $12.95 per month until you call Customer Service to have them deactivate your account. Many people assume that they won’t be billed if they simply don’t use the service, but this is untrue. And since the billing takes place a month or two later, it is easily overlooked. A cruel business practice, but not illegal nor, sadly, uncommon.
Rather, this issue is for customers who had previously deactivated their accounts with CheckFree but whose accounts were activated due to a migration error. I do not know whether the error was due to a software glitch or what, but there have been many cases of customers calling Metavante Customer Service reps with CheckFree service reps conferenced on the call, and the CheckFree rep confirms that the consumer had cancelled their account prior to the migration.
Also for the record: I am not doing this for compensation and am not trying to get specific people into trouble. I have just been ignored and don’t know what else to do to stop this illegal billing activity. Some of the Metavante higher-ups I have mentioned this to are on my side but powerless, whereas others shrug it off and blame Intuit’s decision to not reimburse Metavante for the refunds that are given.
Thanks for the update. So does the money go to Intuit directly from the credit card? Metavante does the customer service for Intuit, processes refunds and then gets reimbursed by Quicken for the one month?
Trying to figure out the flow of the money.
I can’t believe they don’t even put the phone number with the charge on the statement. The INTENTIONS are obvious - milk the consumers as long as possible.
“It has now been decided that any consumer will only get _one_ month refunded, no matter how long the billing has occurred.”
Hopefully many people will dispute the charges with their credit card, they have 60 days from billing. But it’s such a small amount, even *I* would probably often let it go, you just run out of time.
“I do not know whether the error was due to a software glitch”
It would seem that Metavante would want to know what happened to avoid these problems in the future. Hopefully I’ll get some more info once I hear from Chip Swearngan or others from Metavente or Intuit next week.
The more I learn about the financial services industry, the less I like it.
I used to so highly recommend Quicken. As a long time user (since the 80s), I used to call their tech support and speak to real people. I was a diehard TurboTax user until they started “protecting” their software so it became unusable.
Intuit transformed into another scummy corporation continually engaging in illegal practices.
It would take a while to compile a complete list of complaints, a few are already posted here, do a search.
