Who is minding the store?

December 28th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

Who is minding the store?It’s not uncommon, whenever a company is bought or sold of any size, that there is confusion, mistakes, and often times utter chaos. No matter how good a company is at acquisitions, it’s just a fact of life, employees leave or at least are uncertain about their futures no matter what senior management says, even a master at acquisitions like KKR isn’t immune to such matters. One example of this would be FirstData and gift cards. It seems this Wednesday, Wal-Mart and many other retailers had problems processing gift cards which is being blamed right back on their processing service provider FirstData.

While not uncommon for companies to try and find a scapegoat, it seems to make sense that a network wide problem would result in a processing-related issue; mind you when FirstData was asked about the matter, they cited confidentiality as is common in the merchant processing space. It seems the old adage may be true here, if you don’t service your clients, someone else will. I guess the question is going to be who is going to step up to the plate and take FirstData’s place in gift card processing because Wal-Mart isn’t one to accept such a meltdown as experienced here, no matter what assurances they may be given in the future.

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There Is 1 Response So Far. »

  1. Comment by Afiq on 25 January 2008:

    A lot of revenues is lost there. Imagine having a one-day downtime for giftcards processing around the country - probably more than a million is lost there even though it is in terms of giftcards, but still.

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