People enrolled in Visa U.S.A.'s Visa Extras rewards program have had problems redeeming their points online in recent weeks because of a problem with an ongoing conversion of the program's vendor.
One banker said the problem dated back to the start of November, though it appeared to have been partly fixed by Wednesday.
Carlson Marketing has long administered the Visa Extras program, but last month Visa began shifting the work to Maritz Inc. The two vendors are among the largest in the rewards redemption industry; Carlson declined to comment on the transition. A spokesperson for Maritz confirmed that the company is taking over the program, but would not discuss the conversion.
Charles T. Doyle, the chairman and chief executive of Texas Independent Bankshares in Texas City, said Monday that a number of people with Visa cards issued by his company had complained that they could not redeem points online.
"The only way they can redeem during this transition period, while they are moving from one vendor to the other," is by telephone, Mr. Doyle said Monday. Some callers have been told they might have to wait as long as 12 minutes before a customer service representative would be available to help them redeem their points.
Texas First employees have been able to expedite the process for some customers, reducing the wait to about three minutes, "but still it's a long, long wait," Mr. Doyle said.
"The fact that this time of year is a prime time for redemptions for gifts has created somewhat of a problem," he said. "Obviously we're caught in a real bind here, not providing quality service during the peak season."
Mr. Doyle said that the vendor conversion was originally scheduled for Nov. 1, which is when his company became aware of the issue.
Visa Extras is a program that many banks use for their own commercial card rewards programs.
Kristen Baird Adams, a spokeswoman for National City Corp., said the Cleveland banking company had experienced some problems with Visa Extras, but she would not elaborate.
In a written statement sent Wednesday to American Banker, Visa acknowledged that "Visa Extras users were temporarily unable to redeem their Visa Extras points for rewards online." They were also unable to view their up-to-date points balance on the Web site, though points continued to accrue with qualifying purchases, and people redeemed "more than 600 million Extras points" during the conversion period.
Visa did not say when the problem began or what caused it.
It said the conversion project was meant to upgrade the Visa Extras Web site, "with the goal of creating a more flexible and robust system for our member financial institutions and their cardholders."
Visa's statement also said the problem had been resolved; Mr. Doyle said Wednesday that Texas Independent customers were able to redeem their points online.
Aaron McPherson, the research director for payments with Financial Insights, an IDC company in Framingham Mass., said Visa's conversion project seemed to have taken longer than average. "It sounds like a classic botched job," he said.
He speculated that customer account data could not be "mapped" easily from one system to the other. "There must have been a lot of manual rework required."
Scott Strumello, an associate with Auriemma Consulting Group Inc. in Westbury, N.Y., said that when such mapping problems occur, "the bigger issue is, was any data lost? And because Visa has the transaction data on their own systems, that's unlikely to occur."
