Note: Effective August 29, 2022 the reserve requirement has been removed and set to 0%.
In yet another sign that things are returning to normal, we are taking several actions to improve the speed of payments to our customers.
- Reduce Event Reserve requirement to 2.5%.
- Reduce Post Event Payout to immediately after the event.
Note there continues to be no reserve requirements on donations.
Reserve Requirement
In March, 2020 we reacted to the risks the pandemic was bringing to live events. At that point in time, we had paid out over $75 Million to our customers that was at severe risk since participants could process chargebacks via their credit card companies for non-delivery of what was purchased. We instituted a 20% holdback and have reduced this incrementally to 10% then to 5% and now to 2.5% being held until the event is completed.
This means that we hold 2.5% of the event fees paid by participants until after the event is held. If you collect $10,000, we hold $250 to cover risk of chargebacks.
You can read the history of this on this blog post.
Post Event Payout is Immediate after the Event
We have had a policy where we delay payout by 8 days after an event and then assess a variety of data before we pay with a potential for another 21 day delay. This is being removed unless there are more than 3 Chargebacks or more than 0.1% of registrations with a chargeback (this applies to large events, so a 10,000 person event would have to have over 10 chargebacks).
Most customers are on a weekly payment basis that triggers on Tuesday. So events that complete on a Saturday or Sunday have payments process on the Tuesday after the event rather than wait the 8 days. The only exception is if there is a higher than normal chargeback rate. If there are a higher than normal chargeback rate, then payments will be delayed until 21 days after the most recent chargeback.
This change is effective for events that conclude today and moving forward.
More Information
We will be updating these various information sources over the coming days. Here are some links:
