Bill.com Quietly Decided to Divert Customer Funds To Unwanted Bank Accounts
They put this change into their terms of service, and were quite evasive about it. Here's the notice of the change in the terms: "Schedule 2 (Accounts Receivable Service): We updated Section 1, Agent of the Payee; Receipt of Funds; Section 7, Expedited Payment Services Including Instant Transfer; and Section 8, Vendor Direct Service."[1]Here are the old terms.[2] And the new terms.[3] The big changes are in the "Agent of the Payee" section.Old text:When You use the Accounts Receivable Service to originate ACH debits to Your Customer’s account or when You use Real Time Payments, You appoint Bill.com to act as Your agent in connection with the receipt of funds from Your Customer. Receipt of funds from Your Customer by Bill.com will be deemed to be receipt of funds by You, and will satisfy any payment obligations of Your Customer even if payment is not received by You.New text:When You use the Accounts Receivable Service, You appoint Bill.com to act as Your agent in connection with the receipt of funds from Your Customer. Receipt of funds from Your Customer by Bill.com will be deemed to be receipt of funds by You, and will satisfy any payment obligations of Your Customer even where You have elected to receive the payment from Your Customer through Our expedited payment services or are enabled to receive Vendor Direct payments or are enabled for a Bill.com Balance (collectively “Vendor Payment Methods”). When at least one of these Vendor Payment Methods is elected or enabled, You authorize Bill.com to designate a Bill.com account held for the benefit of Our customers as Your primary receiving account for receipt of funds for all payments or transfers made from Your Customers to You. The Bill.com account will serve as Your Bill.com primary and default account for receipt of the funds from Your Customers. All other bank accounts that You may have added to Your Bill.com profile as Payment Accounts will be secondary to the Bill.com primary account.Note the new text:You authorize Bill.com to designate a Bill.com account held for the benefit of Our customers as Your primary receiving account for receipt of funds for all payments or transfers made from Your Customers to You.At this point, if you're a Bill.com customer, you need legal advice.Questions to ask as a customer:- Where is this Bill.com account held?- Are you a creditor of Bill.com, or do you have a fiduciary relationship with Bill.com and actually own the funds in a shared bank account elsewhere?- Does FDIC coverage extend to said shared account? (See this FDIC document.[3])Here are Bill.com's financial statements filed with the SEC.[5] They're losing money at a rather high rate, $80 million in Q4 2021. Revenue and losses both increased substantially in the last year. They're already a public company, so the funding round phase is over. Their biggest expense is "Sales and Marketing", also about $80 million per quarter, which is how they manage to lose money in what ought to be a highly profitable business.Their biggest asset is $3 billion in "funds held for customers", which, if they show that on their balance sheet, is not the property of the customer. It's money they owe their customers. They're acting as a bank.Uh oh.If you have substantial funds in Bill.com, having an accountant and a lawyer look really hard at those documents might be a good idea.[1] https://help.bill.com/hc/en-us/articles/4422858850701-Update...[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20211110201725/https://www.bill....[3] https://www.bill.com/legal/terms-of-service[4] https://www.fdic.gov/deposit/diguidebankers/documents/fiduci...[5] https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search/#/category=form-cat1&ciks=0...