Republic Bank Takes Ownership Of Credit Card Processing Error

Republic Bank is again taking ownership of the credit card fiasco that saw customers of PriceSmart and other businesses having duplicate transactions and refund discrepancies from their credit card accounts. Republic Bank admits that technical challenges recently experienced with the Bank’s credit card processing system have had an unintended, negative impact on several local customers as well as a subset of the bank's credit card merchants, including PriceSmart Trinidad. The Bank assures that the matter was corrected and all steps have been taken to prevent re-occurrence and again apologises to impacted customers, merchants, and the local banking sector who would have faced reputational damage as a result of this error. Nigel Baptiste, President and Managing Director at Republic Bank, said while it understands that impacted customers are concerned about the development, the level of negative sentiment directed towards PriceSmart is regrettable since the matter was not of their making. During the period August 14th to September 6th, 2023, credit card holders who used their cards had transactions inadvertently being processed as US Dollar transactions instead of TT dollar transactions.