Originally Posted by jdubs1982

This is going to be long and rambling, but I was talking to a friend who has a ton of experience with online payment processing who talked to Tomas yesterday and was just explaining to me what his gut feeling about everything is.

I have no real inside information my friend Is actually probably why the message yesterday was sent, because he was getting on Tomas about the lack of transparency and the lack of follow up after the email from earlier this summer claiming things would be "fixed" within a month...and just the overall shity way they handle things.

From support tickets to the whole when there are delays in payouts there not being any sort of "pro active" alert when there are problems. And according to him he said Tomas agreed that they'd handled things poorly and that he realizes that they o need to be more open and honest about whats going on when something goes wrong, but that there was a fear at least last spring that if they did come out and fully explain the problems they were having that people would bail and they'd go under simply because of merchants running away but he said Tomas said he would start addressing issues more head on (and followed up with the message that everyone else got).

My friend said he doesn't have any inside info on what if any changers are coming. So I don't really have any new facts to add, but my buddy has been involved with web based businesses for a while now, got my foot in the door with alot of things. So I trust his gut and this is the "short" version (its going to be long and rambling, but I'm passing along what I consider an "informed educated guess" as to what is going on) of what he says his gut tells him about Zombaio.

He says he doesn't think they are thieves which is good, but he says he thinks there's alot of "learning as they go" which is not an ideal situation for them to be "learning" while messing around with everyone's money.

He says the feel he's gotten from various chat session and email excahnges with the people around the company is Zombaio pays in batches, two maybe three times a week. "Payout cleared" is not "we've received your money and are sending it to you, its a "this payment has been assigned to a batch for payout" when the batch is paid out depends on when they have the money to pay it out. (He also said Tomas mentioned that once everything is settled and payouts are normalized, that he does agree they need to turn their attention to improving the front end reporting of payouts)

But he said his feeling is the way things have been is Zombaio uses a bunch of smaller, banks to deal with processing. (they probably have shit credit, and takes whatever deals they can get) some of these can't settle to the US for example, which means US accounts are routed through a handful of other banks, some of their banks can't accept payments from certain places so those are settled to who knows where and all the while each bank is taking a processing cut, you have salaries for Michael O, Jesper, David, Tomas.. you likely have Samport and whoever taking their cut (more than likely they or somebody provided start up money, and while it sucks, does mean they technically are a creditor and Zombaio does or at least did have to pay them). And at the end of the food chain are the merchants, when there's enough money received to settle a batch of payouts they settle and we get paid.

When you ask Michael O where are x,y,z payments, more then likely he can see what batch its assigned to and what day that's scheduled to go out and that's what info he gives you. The problem with that is if there's been too many bites taken out of the money pie, they simply don't have the money to settle a payout batch.. so that batch rolls over and even though you were told the money would be sent Tuesday, it isn't.

Which all sounds horrible, and sounds like a company that has no way out because even if they get a infusion of cash now its like paying off a credit card with another credit card. But what my friend says his guess is they've secured a deal that covers the three things they need not to go under and what "restructuring" refers to.. and that's a partner with a little more knowledge/organizational know how than the current group, cash, and more important a banking deal.

The cash clearly is needed to allow them to catch up and get out from under all the past problems, organization because they honestly don't seem to know whats coming in vs whats going out which is why support is basically worthless 99% of the time. And a better banking deal will hopefully allow them to cut out some of the middle man BS. (They're more than likely basically laundering money through various 3rd parties in order to be able to serve as many countries as they do).

He said if he had to guess, processing rates likely won't go up, but he wouldn't be surprised if settlement dates are pushed back to 30 days or something like that instead of 20 (which I mean I think everyone would be fine with since now 20 = 60+ days), reserve % may increase - because larger banks may want to see larger reserves in order to do business with them. And he said, if he was in charge he would probably eliminate weekly payouts, and possibly even bi-weekly payouts at least temporarily to eliminate the fees they have to pay every time they payout, and to make record keeping easier until they get better organized and a payment flow.

Again I don't have any inside information, simply relaying an educated guess from a friend who I trust and I know he talked to Tomas yesterday about everything (he told me before the message was sent yesterday that a message was likely incoming regarding everything) --- it could be 100% wrong he said Tomas didn't tell him the new terms, didn't tell him what the restructuring consistent of and Zombaio could be thieves or the "restructuring" could fail and they could still end up belly up. But in his opinion the effort to make sure everyone gets paid is genuine, and that if they do actually have "more favorable terms", as the message sent yesterday said, from their banking partners things could get much better pretty soon.