Desjardins Visa Payment Delay Fixed, Members Still Wary

The Desjardins Visa payment delay is the money headline Quebec cannot stop talking about, and the company now says the glitch is fixed. Desjardins Group said Monday that a delay in processing payments sent to Visa cards held at other financial institutions has been resolved, according to Canada News Media. Some members, though, are still reporting problems after a multi-day overhaul of the cooperative's credit card system.

What Desjardins says it fixed

Spokesperson Jean-Benoit Turcotti spoke on Montreal radio station 98.5 FM. In French, he explained that Desjardins had seen a delay in processing payments made to Visa credit cards at other institutions only. "Good news, it is now resolved," he said, as translated in the report.

According to 98.5 FM, Turcotti added that the payments have now reached the other institutions, which can process them using the date on which they were originally made. That detail matters, because the date a payment lands decides whether you owe a late fee.

Why people were stressed

The trouble started with a planned maintenance window. Desjardins announced in a September news release that the work would run from October twelve to October twenty as part of modernizing its credit card management system.

During that stretch, card purchases, payments, account viewing and lost or stolen card replacement by phone were supposed to keep working. Unavailable features included credit limit increases, contact information changes, PIN changes, rewards and BONIDOLLARS exchanges, and replacement of defective cards.

The maintenance wrapped up on October twenty, yet complaints kept piling up. Some payments to Visa cards still did not show up, which raised fears of late payments and dings to credit scores. Host Patrick Lagace said on air that he was getting texts from people who seemed stuck in the limbo of the update.

What is still unclear

Turcotti's update covered the Visa payment delay specifically. Whether the wider account management problems, including complaints about payments made through the AccesD online platform, are fully solved has not been confirmed. Canada News Media notes that the fix rests on Desjardins' own account, and the company has not published a count of affected members.

The company's earlier release did not mention any compensation, credits or fee waivers for affected members. It also warned that Desjardins will not contact cardholders to ask for personal information about the modernization, a useful reminder because big system changes tend to attract scammers.

A bumpy year for the app

This is not the first stumble. In March, Desjardins reversed part of a platform update that had changed how credit card balances appeared, after a member's petition gathered more than sixteen thousand signatures, according to Noovo as cited by Canada News Media. The company said at the time that the changes caused confusion and that it had listened to feedback.

The timing is awkward for households already feeling squeezed. Rogers recently said it will charge a one point six per cent fee on credit card bill payments, and the Bank of Canada is set to announce its next rate decision on October twenty-eight, with several big banks now expecting a hike. For more Canadian stories like this, check our Canada section.

What you can do right now

If you paid a Visa card from a Desjardins account in the past couple of weeks, check your statement. Ask the card issuer to confirm the exact date it received your payment, since the fix means those payments should be processed with their original dates.

If you find a late fee or interest charge tied to the delay, contact Desjardins directly. The company lists a help line of one, eight five five, eight seven eight, two nine seven three, and information at its modernization page on desjardins.com.

Screenshots of your payment confirmation are worth saving, too. Even if the problem is mostly behind the company, a paper trail is the easiest way to win a dispute over a fee or a credit report mark. Canada News Media says it will update the story if Desjardins confirms that every affected payment has been corrected.