Potential Payments Delays

9:30am ET Update: We have received multiple confirmations of successful funding for today’s payrolls. We are confident that everything was paid on time this morning and will be paid on time for future payrolls.

We are now considering this incident resolved. We plan to follow up with a Root Cause Analysis next week that will outline in greater detail what happened and the steps Check is taking to avoid any delayed payments going forward. In the meantime, if you have any questions or should any issues arise, please reach out to support@checkhq.com or via our Support Portal.

Please know that even with this immediate incident considered resolved, we remain diligent in our efforts to ensure complete & ongoing payments reliability. We understand that paying people on time is critical to our collective success. We simply did not meet the mark with yesterday’s payment delays. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to ensure payments reliability, and we will follow up with more details on our go-forward approach next week.

6:00pm ET Update: We have continued to work closely with JP Morgan Chase to remedy the situation and ensure all transactions going forward are paid out on time.

To recap, all credits that were delayed today were successfully processed at the 10:30am ET ACH window and were settled with receiving banks at 1:00pm ET. As a reminder, it may take until midnight local time for funds to be made available to affected employees & contractors, depending upon the bank.

Regarding the debits that were delayed, we have confirmed with JPMC that these debits will process in the overnight 8:30pm ET ACH window tonight and will settle at 8:30am ET tomorrow morning. Regardless of when Check receives those funds, there will be no impact or delay for any future credits to employees & contractors for whom those debits were meant. Check will float the risk for all of the delayed debits to ensure everyone impacted by the delayed debits is paid on time tomorrow morning.

Looking forward, we have spent several hours collaborating with the JPMC team to gain comfort in tomorrow’s payments landing on time. Specifically, we have pre-cleared the amounts for tomorrow’s debits and credits with their risk team, ensuring that no limits will be tripped that could cause a manual review. We have also confirmed that our account balance is more than sufficient to process transactions tomorrow. We will continue to coordinate closely with the JPMC team throughout the evening until all payments have been released to the Fed.

This will be our final update this evening. Once we have confirmed that tomorrow’s payments have been successful, we will provide one more response and close out this incident. We will also plan to provide a full Root Cause Analysis next week. Thank you all for your continued patience and understanding in this matter.

3:30pm ET Update: We continue to work closely with JP Morgan Chase to remedy the situation.

We have now identified all of the employee & contractor credits and employer debits that were delayed this morning. We have updated your existing impact lists with this data, inclusive of when we expect these transactions to settle. Please see these in the “Actually Impacted Debits” and “Actually Impacted Credits” sheets of the file [2023-07-20] Delayed Payments by going to the Incidents folder of our Shared Google Drive.

We are now focusing exclusively on ensuring that all payments for tomorrow will land on time. We will follow up by 6:00pm ET with our latest status.

2:15pm ET Update: We continue to work closely with JP Morgan Chase to remedy the situation.

All credits that were delayed today were successfully processed at the 10:30am ET ACH window and were settled with receiving banks at 1:00pm ET. As a reminder, it may take until midnight local time for funds to be made available to affected employees & contractors, depending upon the bank.

Regarding the debits that were delayed, we have confirmed with JPMC that these debits will process in the overnight 8:30pm ET ACH window tonight and will settle at 8:30am ET tomorrow morning.

Regardless of when Check receives those funds, there will be no impact or delay for any future credits to employees & contractors for whom those debits were meant. Check will float the risk for all of the delayed debits to ensure everyone impacted by the delayed debits is paid on time tomorrow morning.

We continue to work with JPMC to gather up a list of all impacted credits to employees & contractors and debits from employers and will share that information with you ASAP.

We will follow up as soon as impact lists are prepared, or latest at 5:00pm ET with our latest status.

11:30am ET Update: We have successfully worked with JPMC to hit the 10:30 am ET Same Day ACH window and have now confirmed that all credits have been sent out in that window. This means that funds would settle with receiving banks by latest 1:00pm ET. Please note that we have already confirmed via our canary payments and specific employees that these payments have landed. However, it may take until midnight local time for funds to be made available to affected employees & contractors, depending upon the bank.

For any debits that have not yet completed, we are still investigating their status. Regardless of processing timeline, we are committed that all employees & contractors will be paid on time tomorrow. We will follow up at 2:00pm ET with our latest status.

11:00am ET Update: We are continuing to work with JP Morgan Chase to unblock the subset of payments that were held up in a manual risk review. At this point, the payments have passed any risk checks and files are currently undergoing JPMC’s release process.

Our efforts currently are to release affected payments at the next Same Day ACH window at 2:45pm ET. This would mean that funds would settle with receiving banks by 5:00pm ET. Please note that it may take until midnight local time for funds to be made available to affected employees & contractors.

We will follow up again as soon as we confirm these payments will hit the 2:45pm ET window, or otherwise by 1pm ET, with our latest status.

Update: We have established contact with JP Morgan Chase and have determined that roughly one-third of our payment transactions have been held up due to a manual review on JPMorgan’s end. At this current time, we are not certain which of these transactions have been paid out and which are delayed.

JPMorgan is actively working to release the currently-held funds and have everyone paid today via one of today’s Same Day ACH windows. We will follow-up by 11:00am ET with another update.

Several of our test payments through JP Morgan Chase have not landed on time for this morning’s 8:30am ET ACH window. Based on this information, it is likely that payments will be delayed for some of your customers.

What we have identified: Check sends several debit + credit canary test payments out during all money movement transfer windows to ensure that payments land on time. This morning’s payments did not settle at their usual time and are now beyond the 8:30am ET ACH settlement window, which may indicate that some customer payments due to be paid out this morning are delayed. Note however that we have seen our aggregate bank balance in JP Morgan Chase increase overnight, indicating that some money movement has been successful.

As a reminder, please note that the statuses in Check’s system assume payment success, and are currently not reliable indicators of whether a payroll has successfully been paid.

Customer impact: All customers who were meant to be debited and credited today are potentially impacted. For more detail on affected customers, please see the file [2023-07-20] Delayed Payments by going to the Incidents folder of our Shared Google Drive. Note that these delays do not impact payments to tax agencies.

What action is required: At this time, we do not recommend that you reach out proactively to customers. Rather, we suggest you brief your Support teams to be prepared to speak to any delay and planned resolution. Please let us know if you hear any reports of delayed payments from your customers.

When we plan to next follow up: We will follow up by no later than 10:00am ET with additional information.

Check takes paying people on time seriously. We apologize for the delay and are working hard to rectify the situation and get all impacted persons paid out today. Please reach out to support@checkhq.com or via our Support Portal if you have any questions.