I have written about how the swallowing of the service provider Afex by Cambridge Global Payments (aka Fleetcor, aka Corpay) has been a disaster (blog article, blog article, blog article). One of the most recent developments is that, perhaps in retaliation for these blog articles, a manager at Afex unilaterally decided to close our Afex account. This of course required figuring out how much money was in our account at Afex and then transferring it to one of our accounts at some bank account. It now looks like the manager did his math wrong, transferring an incorrect amount of money. And the so-called EZTrack web links that are supposed to tell us the status of the money transfer to us do not work. You can’t make this stuff up if you try.
The manager asked us which of our bank accounts I wanted the money transferred to, and I selected one of our bank accounts. And then he set up an ACH transfer for a particular amount of money. And then the Cambridge Online system communicated to me an EZTrack link which goes to a web page. I have learned just in the last few days that this is one of the features of the Cambridge Global Payments system. If you as an Afex customer send money through Afex to a beneficiary, and if there is an email address set up for that beneficiary, then the system will communicate one of these EZTrack web links by email to the beneficiary. The point of the email and the link is to let the beneficiary know that the money is on its way, and the idea is that the beneficiary can then click on the web link and they can track in real time the status of the money transfer. This is the sort of thing that computers are supposed to be good at, right? Sort of like tracking a Fedex package!
This kind of thing makes the Afex customer look good in the eyes of the beneficiary because it reassures the beneficiary that everything is really under control. It is sort of like saying “the check is in the mail” and the beneficiary can be reassured that the check is really in the mail.
Except not. In the past three days we have received three of these EZTrack links. You can see above what happened when we clicked on one of them. It ran us through a captcha (“click on each panel that shows a motorcycle” followed by “click on each square where there is dog excrement on the sidewalk”, that kind of thing). Once we satisfied the captcha, the screen refreshed, and then what appeared is a screen like you see above. It shows the Cambridge Online logo very prominently, and then in smaller print it says “Unknown Error”. At no point does it actually provide any information about the actual status of the money transfer that is supposedly on its way to us.
Several people in my office have tried clicking on all three of the EZTrack links. One of the links is meant to reassure us that a transfer of about $26K is on its way to us. Another is meant to reassure us that a transfer of about $2300 is on it is way to us. And the third is meant to reassure us that a transfer of $10 is on its way to us. But nobody in my office is able to get any of the three EZTrack links to work. Oh, we are able to get to the part where it makes the person do the captcha. But then after that it always says “Unknown Error”. They have tried this in three different browsers, at various times of day. No joy. I am relieved to tell you that we do actually see the $26K on its way to us in the online computer banking of the particular bank where that money is headed — it appears as a “pending incoming” amount of money.
The alert reader will wonder, why a transfer for $10? It turns out the manager person who unilaterally decided to close our account apparently did not do his math right, and when he sent what he thought was a transfer that would close out our account, did a transfer that was $10 short. This then left another $10 to transfer and only then would all of our money be transferred to our bank. Never mind that our bank may well charge us $10 to receive that transfer, depending on how the manager person decided to send the money. Anyway, as best I can tell the manager person did not do his math right when he worked out what our closing balance was. You can’t make this stuff up.
I am (was) an AFEX customer for TEN YEARS. Received an email recently about account closure. I thought it was just a generic email as my AFEX account is “closing” and becoming CORPAY; but, no….
Emailed my account manager and they confirmed that my account was being closed at EOY due to being non-profitable. I am not sure how – I pay a $10 fee every time, I carry out my exchanges on the web-platform, so they get money for “free” from me regularly. Before replying to my manager, I checked Cambridge (etc) websites, all of which boast about being able to cater for any size business.
I emailed my manager, explained my position. They did not reply.
INSTEAD – I received a phone call a couple of days later from some guy at an unrelated FX company. My manager had “passed on” my details to a third party. I’m not impressed with the way my account was closed, nor how my privacy was not respected. I’ve tried calling AFEX, but their phones aren’t being answered.
How could your account be non-profitable? They hold your money and they don’t pay you interest on it. They can make money on your money. I am sorry you had to go through that. Seems like if you gave them your business for ten years they could at least be nicer about it all.
Anyway, we now use Wise (formerly Transferwise). Maybe that service provider would work for you.
It makes no sense, but rather than explain, they ignore my email and breach my privacy.
A couple of months ago they sent me “new” Cambridge bank account details to deposit foreign funds in – they were unusable as they weren’t “local” to each country – they were all domestic accounts. Each transfer in would require a SWIFT and exchange to my local currency; my manager did not see any issue with that….
I have a Wise account. I have used them for some incoming payments for a while now (and then would transfer to AFEX). And now WISE is used for outgoing as well.