ACH Outage Postmortem

On June 18th there was an incident that occurred with our card processor that affected many of our Nucleus Giving and RebelGive accounts, specifically pertaining to ACH donations and ACH Transfers/payouts. We acted promptly with information that we had to ensure that your accounts were taken care of, as well your peace of mind. Now that all incidents have been resolved, this is a proper postmortem of the incident and our coinciding response and perspective.

When a gift is made to your church through Nucleus Giving or RebelGive, whether ACH or credit card, it is processed by a payment processor. At Nucleus/RebelGive, those payments are processed by CardConnect/Fiserv.

Note: If you did not receive a Transfer on June 18th, you were most likely unaffected by any of this aside from the July 3rd update below.

On June 18th, the ACH division of the card processor we partner with (noted as BluePay from here on out) noted a connectivity issue, resulting in some missing transaction data.

This caused some donations on that day to be marked as “failed”. Donors then received a typical notice of failure from our system. So far, so good.

However, once the connectivity issue was resolved later that day, some of those transactions marked as failed, were actually then processed, while some others remained in their original, failed state.

At the same time of this incident, ACH donations that were being deposited were also affected. This resulted in transaction data for most June 18th ACH Transfers, to be missing.

On June 19th, we notified all giving accounts through our product dashboards, of the ACH outage with a summary of the event, and the anticipated outcome on gifts. Our status page was also linked for easy reference to realtime status.

On June 20th, BluePay found additional information to be missing.

In an attempt to resolve this missing data, many ACH transactions deposited in the June 18th Transfer, were unfortunately duplicated in a remediation error by the processor.

Those duplicated transaction funds were then withdrawn from donors’ bank accounts, and deposited to churches bank accounts in a June 20th Transfer.

On June 23rd, BluePay began refunding all of the duplicated transactions, beginning with the largest size transactions (those over $10,000) then to all the other transactions in order of size.

On June 27th, we again communicated with all giving accounts through our product dashboards with the most recent update from BluePay regarding their attempted remedy, and the resulting duplicate charges.

We advised churches to set aside those funds in preparation for the duplicate charges being ultimately reversed, and we made sure our status page was easily accessible with the updates as well.

On July 1st, BluePay confirmed that all refunds had been initiated. Any donor affected by this should have received a refund within 7 business days at this point.

At this time, BluePay also withdrew all duplicated transactions from our church’s bank accounts, in order to issue refunds to all affected donors. (In short, the June 18th Transfer in your Dashboard was reversed.)

Note: You will not see a line item in your Dashboard to match the withdrawal from your church’s bank account, as this refund was not initiated by our system, and was done directly by the processor.

On July 2nd, our founder Brady Shearer sent out a personal email to all Nucleus Giving and RebelGive administrators to summarize the events of the previous few weeks and to give next steps for the future.

Later on that day, BluePay identified some duplicate transactions that did not settle in the June 20th Transfer. This means there are some duplicated donations that also were not able to be refunded with the rest of the refunds.

Note: This particular item is still actively being investigated by BluePay. There are very few donors affected by this specific incident, and we are still monitoring it closely. We will provide a final update about this one particular issue as soon as we receive a resolution notice from BluePay.

On July 3rd, CardConnect charged all of our processing accounts $19.95. While this was supposed to be added to many portfolios of the processing accounts they handle, they were not supposed to be charged to any accounts under the Nucleus or RebelGive label. (This charge might have shown up as a single line item, or as an adjustment on a Transfer on that date.)

Note: This fee was not charged to donors. This was only charged by mistake to churches using our giving platform.

On July 5th, we sent out an email to all Nucleus Giving and RebelGive administrators to notify them of the $19.95 fee that we began seeing on some accounts on July 3rd. We also began actively working with CardConnect to gain further information on the charge and to work on a resolution (i.e. a refund).

On July 16th, we were notified that a refund had been initiated to all churches using our giving platform, and those refunds should settle within 5-7 business days.

As of today, we consider this incident identified and fully resolved.

If you haven’t received your refund yet for the fee, rest assured knowing that they have been issued.

Just to take a step back as we close the book on this issue — we wanted to take a moment to say that we so appreciate everybody’s patience and understanding throughout this entire incident.

So many of you were kind and understanding even in the face of this very frustrating set of events that was made more frustrating by the fact that it wasn’t something we personally could rectify directly in our platform - it was all in the hands of our payment processing partners.

We care so much about all of our churches and the donors using Nucleus/RebelGive, and we started this giving platform to alleviate so many of the pain points churches face with donation systems.

So it hurts us deeply that this even happened, and that the full resolution took as long as it did. It’s not something anyone wants to deal with or experience.

That being said, we did also want to offer some encouragement as we move forward.

Since we launched our donation platform well over 5 years ago (as RebelGive, now also known as Nucleus Giving), we haven’t experienced an issue like this, ever. And it’s not because we’re small potatoes either. We’re moving quickly towards 1 Billion processed for our churches across literally millions upon millions of transactions. So while this particular issue affected hundreds of transactions, it’s not a pattern we’ve seen at all across our entire history as a platform, and we don’t expect it to be any kind of ongoing issue. Percentage-wise, this is a small, yet obviously very unfortunate issue.

Of course, anytime we talk about numbers, we can’t help but remember that what we’ve done together, is to save churches millions upon millions of dollars in fees that would have been lost forever on any other giving platform.

It’s no small feat, and one of the ways we were able to accomplish this together, was by partnering directly with a Tier 1 level Processor (our CardConnect/Fiserv partnership), so we cut out all the middlemen. A Tier 1 Processor is the largest type of payment processor in the world, and they have direct access to the card brands like Visa and Mastercard, as well as huge banks like Chase and Wells Fargo, etc. And as such, they have a high level of accountability for reliability and security.

Obviously over this last month, that reliability was thrown into question as they made some unfortunate, critical errors that affected so many of our churches. And we take that breach of trust very seriously and are internally determining our next steps to ensure the long-term reliability of our partners, and the resiliency of our platform, even though this was a first of its kind issue that was out of our hands.

We’ve also been assured that our processor is taking strong steps to remediate the issue fully, and put extra protections in place to ensure this kind of an error does not happen in the future.

So again, we appreciate your understanding, and hope this helps clear up any confusion around what happened, as well as our current position and our perspective.

If you need anything or have any follow up questions, please don’t hesitate to reply to this email so we can care for you directly.

The Nucleus Team