GoofyBiscuit
GoofyBiscuit

Bengaluru based startup lost 90% of revenue in one night

I work at this company since 2+ years, day before yesterday company received an email from one of the two payment gateways that they use for catering Indian and International users for both payments as well as payouts. Now since the gateway that was catering the international users banned the company's account, all of the international transactions went to 0 quickly which was more than 90% of the total revenue, additionally they fined the company for $425,000

Now the problem for the company is:

  1. The transactions completely stopped
  2. A large sum of money in the account as balance is on hold by the payment gateway accounting to approximately, 1/5th of fine.
  3. The fine which the payment gateway is charging, doesn't have any underlying reason as why the fine amount is so big. 4 There's absolutely no reply from the payment gateway on the email hence no way to contact directly.

Now, the thing is company knew this day was possible but they had took preventive measures as well and weren't expecting this to happen anytime soon and atleast with a prior notice unlike which landed like a bomb with a brief (text only) email.

So there are features called radar and chargeback protection in the payment gateway which take some percentage of your transaction to ensure if there are some fraudulent/illegal transactions they will flag those transactions and prevent the customers (our company in this case) from getting disputes from the card owner/payee, having which of no use to the company. As per the terms, a threshold percentage of your transactions need to be disputed in order to be flagged as suspicious for the payment gateway which was way less in the company's case.

Although company too could have prevented this from just banning users whose payments were getting disputed by the card holders claiming they didn't authorise the purchase or either the user didn't deliver for what the payment was done by the payee. In either of the case banning that user was the ideal action.

11mo ago
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