Bill Payment Service Plastiq Files For Bankruptcy
Plastiq, a service that lets you pay select bills using a credit card, has filed for bankruptcy.
This is a service that was quite popular, and still is to some extent, in the miles and points hobby. For a free, you can pay bills that normally don’t allow credit card payments. The fee has gone up to 2.9% in recent years, and some credit card issuers have added restrictions. So Plastiq is no longer as useful as it used to be. But it can still come in handy when you need to quickly increase your credit card spending, especially when working towards a nice welcome bonus.
If you are one of those people who still uses Plastiq to pay bills, then we have some bad news. View from the Wing reports that the company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Plastiq, which at one point received a $550 million market valuation, already had issues when its processor, Silicon Valley Bank, failed earlier this year.
The San Francisco-based company listed both assets and liabilities in the range of more than $50 million to as much as $100 million in a Chapter 11 petition filed in the District of Delaware.
VFTW reports that this is not a liquidation, and if all goes according to filings in day one proceedings, service might not be interrupted.
Plastiq has secured $7.1 million of debtor-in-possession funding to finance itself through bankruptcy, court papers show. The company plans to sell itself in bankruptcy.
But the outcome is still very uncertain, so you should probably refrain from making any payments through Plastiq for now.
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I used them for a brief period a few years ago. Some payments showed up as cash advances. No points. Cash advance fee was charged. They wouldn’t correct it. Adios. Glad to see how that customer service approach worked out for them.
They put themselves into a pretty difficult spot. I’m not surprised they filed for bankruptcy. Trying to pay things with a cc sounds great from a consumer perspective, but the fees have to be paid out somehow. I used them a little bit when the fees were lower but as the fees kept creeping higher, it became less worthwhile to do. And having lost checks from mailed payments didn’t help either. In theory, it sounded great but in practice it was kind of a mess.