This is a complaint. I think I know who I blame, but my concern seems legitimate and explaining my concern may inform others.
My wife goes through our credit card charges and asked me about a charge for a little more than $100. I did not remember making a purchase in this amount recently and asked her to identify the company. The charge came from Paymentus and the cryptic description of the purchase roughly translated as “technology related”.
There was a phone number. The payment included a long transaction number. I thought I would call and ask about the charge. This turned out not to be helpful. Paymentus said they handle credit card payments for many different companies including many companies selling technology goods and services. Even with the transaction number, the call service employee said it would be difficult to identify the specific company seeking payment and suggested I call my credit card company. I responded that this advice made no sense to me because the credit card company was paying Paymentus and not the company selling the product. I said Paymentus must know the identity of the company they were collecting for or they would be unable to forward the money received to them. The employee seemed unable to understand these arguments and offered no solution.
We called our credit card company. As I expected, they did not know what I had supposedly purchased. They then canceled our credit card assuming this was a fraudulent charge and issued us new cards. This was not what I wanted. I assume the bill was probably legit. I just wanted to know what the charge was for. Since I could not convince Paymentus to determine who had forwarded the request for payment, I thought that the credit card company would likely have more luck getting this information. All I wanted was to know was the identity of company asking for the money.
This seems a very strange way of doing business and a strange solution. I now must register my new credit card with many companies that I pay via a subscription model and I must wait for some angry company to contact me or worse shut off some service I use.