(TN staff, let me know if this topic is inappropriate for the forum, I hope it's fine to discuss since official Worldpay support with Tessitura is being sunset next year!)
I'm curious if anyone has gone through the process of terminating their Worldpay contract after migrating to TMS, and has any guidance or advice to offer. We launched TMS in April but kept our Worldpay contract active to ensure we could keep access to their logs and processor portal through our FY23 fiscal year close and audit. I'm now turning my attention to getting Worldpay all closed up as we are fully on Adyen/TMS for everything nowadays.
Some challenges arise because our original contract probably dates to around 2005 (when we launched Tessi), and has gone through multiple corporate changeovers (from Element to Vantiv to Worldpay, to FIS Global nowadays?). I do have some more recent paperwork from 2019 confirming myself as an authorized signer, Unfortunately our timing is not great in terms of where we are in a one-year renewal cycle, but we've done the math and confirmed it's better to eat the cost of an early termination fee vs letting the contract continue on and ending it during a renewal window. Some searching online brings up anecdotes of it being very hard to end these contracts with Worldpay - per my copy of our Gateway Agreement T&C I'm planning to send Worldpay a letter in writing (via certified mail) notifying them of our intent to cancel, and duplicate it via email to any promising support inboxes I can find...
Please share if you have any experience with this, and I'll keep reporting back myself!
Hello,Your message is timely because I literally was working on this same thing yesterday.
A colleague located this article: https://www.merchantmaverick.com/how-to-cancel-worldpay-account/It wasn't very useful to me because Step One is basically to follow the terms and conditions outlined in your contract. I have been unable to locate our original contract, which predates my time in this role. However, it does recommend sending your notice via certified mail. I think you're on the right track. Definitely include your WP Merchant ID and your company's Federal Tax ID Number. Most importantly, the person who signs the letter will need to be the Signatory name listed on the account.
In addition to our Tessitura WP account, we also have a different WP account for our Boutique. I called the number on their invoice. After a mere 38 minutes on hold, I managed to speak to a real person. (Fun Fact: The WP hold music is a Muzak version of Lynyrd Skynyrd's Simple Man. . . on a loop.) For our boutique account, she sent me a DocuSign form. There is going to be a $500 early termination fee, but for months we have been trying to cancel that account, and all the while they have been charging us a few hundred dollars a month. So, my CFO is okay with that $500 because at least we will stop paying a few hundred a month for an account we haven't used since May.After receipt of the DocuSign form, the account is supposed to be closed in 21 days. (Think happy thoughts.)The reason that it has taken us so long to close our non-Tess WP account is because the Signatory name on that account was in the name of her predecessor. It took her months to finally identify that for some reason MY name was on their account.The reason it has taken us so long to try to cancel our Tessitura WP is because like you I couldn't identify who to call or where to even start. So, while on the phone dealing with their account, I managed to get the agent to look up our Tessitura WP account. Some wires clearly were crossed at some point because the Signatory name on the Tessitura WP account is the name of the former head of our Boutique. (YJCMUTS!) Since I was able to accurately answer all of her other questions and because my name was on the other account, she also sent me a DocuSign form to change the signor name on our account.
The Change of Owner/Authorized Rep Amendment requires the signor to include their home address info and I’m not super comfortable connecting my personal info on this form. My CFO is going to complete that form and the cancellation form on Monday. The name change is supposed to take 5-7 business days and then the cancellation will take 21 days after that. We will be charged another $500 early termination fee.
For our Tessitura WP account, we have not been accumulating monthly minimum charges. It has basically been dormant since the end of Feb when we switched to TMS. So, my CFO asked if we could submit a cancellation request in writing via Certified mail instead of going the early termination route. Blessedly, my second go-round only involved about 10 minutes of Skynyrd hold music. However, my call was transferred multiple times. I think I talked to seven different representatives. And some quoted the early termination fee as $540 and some as $495. I'm not entirely sure how much the fee will be. However, the final person said that we cannot cancel via Certified Mail. She said that we are already in breach of contract because we haven't processed any transactions since Feb. She said that because we switched to a new provider prior to giving them notice we will need to pay the early termination fee no matter what.
I asked my CFO to complete the cancellation DocuSign form with a date 60-90 days in the future and to hope for the best. However, we assume we will be paying the $500-ish early termination fee.
An added wrinkle for us is that we are also in the process of changing banks. So, I asked the WP agent how the fee needed to be paid. She said they will attempt to auto-bill our account for the fee and that if it fails then they will mail us a bill for the fee.All of this to say, I am *closer* to cancelling WP, but I have not crossed the finish line. (think happy thoughts)Hope this was somewhat helpful.
Wow, thank you for so much detail, Dana! This is very helpful. I luckily went through all the bureaucracy in 2019 to become the authorized signer, so hopefully that smooths things out a bit now. I think I've got all our necessary credentials gathered up (vendor ID, sub-merchant IDs) and will be sending our notice by mail and duplicating it via email as best I can, and then following up via phone (and brace for hold muzak) if that doesn't seem to yield any response within a week or two.
It sounds like you're almost at the end of the saga, with a bit of luck, but if it's helpful I do have a generic Payment Gateway Terms & Conditions PDF that's dated Oct 2019 in my archives. It may not be precisely the agreement you were under, but happy to share it if it's a helpful resource at all. Thanks again!