What's to become of IBill?

What's to become of the once mighty IBill?

It's been 6 weeks now since the catastrophe with IBill's merchant
bank First Data Merchant Services.

Their initial move was to go to standby processing, then quickly to
an Asian Pacific gateway. Once there they then found out they were not Visa certified on that gateway and after a few days turned off Visa processing. They then promised quick and easy US Direct payment processing where if you are already an approved IBill client, all you had to do was submit an application and "voila!" you are approved on this new platform. then of course they informed us that there was this tiny little matter of a $1500 Visa merchant fee, that despite having earlier renewed or paid this fee this year, had to be repaid again! Then there was the requirement to submit company financials to qualify for this once touted "sure thing". To date, I have not heard exact numbers but I don't even know if One single company was approved on this processing platform yet. Then IBill started talking about a full time processing through the Asian Pacific gateway that would be an alternative to the US Direct program, but later revealed that this would not come to pass. The next IBill solution to come to light is a product called a "G" card, which is supposed to work like a debit card billed by a third party company and by virtue of this method, it is supposed to be able to work around the MC and Visa portal requirement. This was supposed to be tested over the last weekend, and fully rolled out this week. Haven't heard a word about this products implementation.


Then of course there was the "we have no higher priority than paying our webmasters" statement from IBill, with a once proclaimed "we are targeting the date of October 31st, 2004 to be completely caught up on money owed and to be processing forward.

Well, here is is, October 29th, the last business day of the month. We don't have a new payment platform online, they have not done our recurring Visa transactions for over a month now, we have not been able to forward process Visa for over a month now, they have been taking money processing forward transactions for checks, web 900 and Mastercard, yet they still have not paid their webmasters.

Now the latest is "stay tuned" we'll have a telephone conference on the 3rd of November and you can find out more then.

Obviously IBill has lost a good deal of clients over this mess, and as a result, a lot of cash flow.

So, I just want to hear from anyone that still has any desire to discuss this issue, what do you think will become of IBill?

Are they going to morph into a much smaller payment processor presence outside of the IPSP model?

Are they going to pay their webmasters all the money that is owed to them and live happily ever after?

Are they going to ever get any of their promised "new" programs online?

Are they going to file chapter 7 ?