Belrive Gestion’s software multiplied a Treasury purchase order tenfold, sending €940 million (about $1.1 billion) from a pooled client account into 13-week bills instead of the €94 million the company intended, according to a filing at Paris’s commercial court. The mishap, which occurred during Monday’s auction, affected money held for about 14,200 businesses.
The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday by three customers, seeks €120 million in interim compensation and an order preventing Belrive from selling the remaining bills without court approval. It says the firm’s “instant access” promise became impossible to honour after the cash was committed until December, and that some suppliers’ payments were delayed.
A decimal point, tenfold
The plaintiffs say the company’s account records show that an extra zero was added when its system converted a planned €94 million bid into a €940 million instruction. The order was accepted and settled, they allege, before staff spotted the mismatch. The filing includes transaction timestamps and excerpts from customer account histories.
Michel Chauvet, who runs a 17-person food-packaging business in Seine-Saint-Denis, said a €38,000 transfer to a paper supplier did not arrive on Tuesday. “The money was on our screen, but we couldn’t use it. I had to ask the supplier to wait while my own account looked perfectly healthy,” he said.
We were told our cash was ready when we needed it; then the system said it was tied up until winter.
Michel Chauvet, business owner
Belrive’s chief operating officer, Gerrit Willemsen, acknowledged a “settlement mismatch” in an interview on Wednesday but disputed the claim that customers’ money was trapped until December. He said the company had sold €312 million of bills on the secondary market and restored normal transfers for 96% of affected accounts by Tuesday evening. It would cover bank fees caused by late payments, he said.
Payments catch up
Belrive said it had enough assets to repay customers in full and that no client balance had been lost. The lawsuit argues that access matters as much as the nominal balance: about 2,700 transfers, worth €61 million altogether, were queued or delayed for at least several hours, according to figures cited by the plaintiffs.
The episode has drawn attention to the way cash-management firms pool business deposits and place part of them in short-term government debt. Such bills are generally considered low-risk, but they are not the same as cash in a current account: selling them takes a transaction, and a large hurried sale can complicate payments even when the securities retain their value.
A spokesperson for France’s financial markets regulator said it had requested information from Belrive and was checking whether the company’s disclosures matched the service it sold. Ümran Düşenkalkar, a lawyer for the three businesses, said the case was about the gap between a “cash whenever you ask” promise and a system that could lock up hundreds of millions through one faulty instruction.
Belrive said its board had ordered an external review of the software and that it would publish the findings to customers. The court is expected to consider the request to restrict further sales next week; until then, the company says its payment service is operating normally.
