It’s official. Following weeks of rumors and speculative posts on webmaster forums, third-party payment processing company Paymonde has gone out of business.
According to the company’s chief executive office, Howard Cohen, the decision to shut the company down came after its bank in the Philippines lost acquiring rights to process MasterCard transactions. “We didn’t want to shop around and just place merchants anywhere,” Cohen told AVNOnline.com. “We wanted to have something stable, so we just decided to shut down.”
Cohen said that the bank owes Paymonde three weeks of payments. Although a settlement was promised for last Friday, the bank did not follow through.
“It kills us to [close down],” said the audibly shaken Cohen. “We had so many big plans and such positive momentum.”
Cohen stressed that the choice to shut the company down was made to spare webmasters any further detriment. “I didn’t have to pull the plug. We still had Visa; we could have continued processing, but I didn’t see the payments coming in [from the bank], and I didn’t want to owe the webmasters more money. We weren’t going to keep processing them not knowing if we were going to get the money, so I just said, ‘That’s it, guys. We’re done.’”
Although an official statement by the company had yet to be made, Cohen said he had placed an announcement on the site’s back-end and personally contacted several clients to let them know the news. At press time, the site was inactive. “I feel [terrible] about it,” he bemoaned. “We worked hard. We were always out there on the forefront, and we really cared about our webmasters. It’s unfortunate what happened. That’s it. Five years in the business, and that’s it.”
Cohen said he was particularly disheartened by recent posts made on webmaster boards. “Everybody went ballistic, saying we stole their money. They were saying it before their payouts were even late. To see what’s going on on the boards—seeing people threaten us and say that we ran away with their money—it hurts me. It’s not the case.”
Cohen told AVNOnline.com that he sees Paymonde’s implosion as a cautionary tale. “We got into a bad predicament. It could happen to CCBill; it could happen to Epoch. Those guys are not protected. Their banks could say, ‘That’s it.’ No one is safe.”
Although Cohen could not offer a timetable for webmasters to receive money owed, he promised he would do his best to reimburse them on a case-by-case basis. “We’re good businessmen,” he said. “We’ll take care of everybody as we can.”
