Here is a new scheme one of our country’s largest banks has concocted to extract money from us and use that money interest free for a week without our consent or even knowledge in most cases.

Our company has been using a Chase credit card account for miscellaneous charges for many years. It has a generous line of credit. We have issued employee cards so that our team members can make hotel and rental car reservations directly with their own cards, with the charges going to the company card.

We have discovered that from time to time, employee cards are rejected, causing severe embarrassment to the employee at the hotel counter, as well as inconvenience for our accounting staff to research and make alternative arrangements.

When we make our monthly payments, we usually pay off the entire balance, so there should never be a problem. When one of our staff members was rejected again yesterday, I got on the phone with Chase customer service to get to the bottom of it. The service agent told me they use “float pay” – meaning they hold a payment, post it to the account by the date received, but then do not release the funds under available credit until a week later. When the agent could not explain the rationale and rules applied, I asked for a supervisor. After waiting on hold for a long time, I talked to supervisor Gabriel, who was apologetic but no more helpful. He could not explain the process or rules and kept deferring to back-end processes. I did find out that float pay not only applies to checks (where I could actually understand the rationale), but also to electronic payments, where funds are transmitted right away. Eventually I hung up in frustration and disbelief.

Let’s say our bill is $5,000 for the month. If we get the bill on the first of the month, and if accounting turns around quickly and sends a check out on the second, and the check arrives on the fifth and actually gets posted, the float pay hold then makes the funds available by the 12th. This is if we turn around extremely fast. If the credit limit is exceeded during that almost two-week long period by other ongoing charges by employees, they will eventually get rejected – which is exactly what has been happening.

I am making arrangements to get employee cards from another bank that does not use “float pay” and we will close the Chase account.