Diners Club Club Rewards - Diners Club refuses to accept online payments from Bank of Montreal

Has anybody any idea of what is behind this problem?
Apparently on Friday August 23, 2002 Diners Club started refusing to accept telephone or internet payments from Bank of Montreal. I tried to pay my bill online, and the Bank of Montreal web site refused to accept the payment. I tried doing in over the telephone and actually through a Bank of Montreal customer service representative and they said that they can no longer accept payments for Diners Club. I called Diners Club (on Sunday August 25, 2002) and the telephone representative (I got one, but I expected no less from Diners Club) said they are aware of the problem since Friday but have no idea where the problem is. I tried again paying the bill on Monday night and it still did not work.

Has Diners Club refused all banks? All Canadian banks? Is it just Diners Club Enroute? Diners Club Canada? Has anybody else paid their Diners Club online or by telephone banking since Friday?

The text of the response from Bank of Montreal follows:
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Thank you for your inquiry, Mr. ShortHaul. My name is Betty and I appreciate the opportunity to respond.

I apologize for the difficulty you experienced attempting to pay your bill online. I regret to advise the reason you are unable to Pay Diners Club is that Diners Club has recently decided to withdraw from accepting electronic bill payments. Thus, your online payment could not be processed and you received an error message. I can understand the error message is not representative of the situation and we are working to correct this. Please note, we were very recently advised of this matter by Diners Club.

You may want to contact Diners Club directly to discuss the convenience of online bill payments and to further discuss your concerns. In the meantime, alternate payment arrangements should be made with Diners Club.

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Diners Club Canada is a pain in the a**. Branch/ATM payments and Phone/Net payments are processed by different third-party companies contracted by the Canadian Banks. The largest phone/net payment processor used by many banks (not sure about BMO) is Telpay.ca.

That is why you will notice a DIFFERENCE of merchants that a bank's customer can pay to. In this case, Diners was removed from one but still stayed at the other. This could be due to a high fraud rate or a breakdown in commision/fee negotiation.

An example is that my bank will not take payment for President's Choice MasterCard online/by phone. But they will take it in the branch. I had this situation since I got my card about 1 year ago... and they are still working on it, yeah right.

If you look at www.telpay.ca, (http://www.telpay.ca,) both PC MC and DC Cda are not on their EXTENSIVE list. Even very small companies can be paid but not these major national companies. There must be a reason.

FYI,
I had no problem paying DC Canada from my Royal Bank online account this Monday (26 Aug), so it might just be a BMO problem.

Cheers,
-Ty

My payment via TD web made on friday went through without a problem

They resolved the problem.
I got a phone call message at work after 5 PM on Friday September 6, 2002 from a Diners Club representative - "the problem with Bank of Montreal has been fixed". Not sure which source of reporting the problem triggered the call - Diners Club web site posting or original telephone call to customer service. I would guess the telephone call because the web site posting had one reply by email so I would expect subsequent replies by email.

I paid the bill online at Bank of Montreal on Tuesday September 10 with no problem.

Not a perfect situtation but they had a problem, they fixed it and they gave me a phone call to tell me the problem was fixed. I can live with that and call it acceptable customer service. Particularly with the call back that the problem was fixed.

Edited to correct spelling.

[This message has been edited by ShortHaul (edited 09-17-2002).]