A strike by 360 staff at Clairpont Paiements disrupted overnight settlement checks and triggered a recovery system that sent duplicate credit instructions to 14 banks, the company said. The extra €312 million (about $360 million) appeared in merchants’ account records, but was not a second payment from customers.
By midday, banks had placed the disputed entries on hold, leaving thousands of shops unable to tell whether they could use the inflated balances. Card payments at tills continued to work, but Clairpont warned merchants not to transfer or spend any funds linked to Friday’s duplicate credits.
How the batch was replayed
The fault began shortly after 02:00, when a backup process at Clairpont’s Lille operations centre replayed a settlement file already sent to banks, according to the company’s chief operating officer, René B. Zeilinger. He said the strike had left too few staff to complete a required manual check before the recovery process restarted.
Clairpont processes card payments for about 22,400 French businesses, from cafés to regional retail chains. The company said 14 banks received the repeated instructions; it was still reconciling individual merchant accounts on Friday afternoon and could not yet say how many shops had seen the erroneous credits in their available balances.
Georgeta Bucur, a shift controller and strike delegate, said workers had warned managers that the overnight team was too small to supervise a restart. “They treated a recovery as routine, when the people who know the checks were outside on the pavement,” she said.
They treated a recovery as routine, when the people who know the checks were outside on the pavement.
Georgeta Bucur, shift controller and strike delegate
Merchants face frozen balances
The walkout began at 23:00 on Thursday over a proposed change to weekend staffing and a wage increase workers say falls short of inflation. Picketing staff gathered outside Clairpont’s brick-and-glass office in Lille, while the company brought in managers from other sites to keep its payment network running.
In Toulouse, café owner Sophie Gusmão said her bank app briefly showed a settlement more than twice the amount she expected. The bank then marked the credit as unavailable, she said, forcing her to delay a supplier payment until she could confirm her real balance. “The money looked there, then it became a warning on the screen,” she said.
Clairpont said it had identified the repeated batch and was working with banks to remove the extra entries. Zeilinger apologised to merchants and said the company expected account records to be corrected by Saturday morning, though some banks might take longer to update balances.
Akshay R. Sinha, a payments-risk consultant, said the episode showed how a staffing dispute could expose weaknesses in automated financial safeguards without any customer account being hacked. French regulators had asked banks to confirm they could identify and quarantine repeated instructions, a person familiar with the request said.
The strike was due to continue through Saturday unless talks resume. Workers are seeking a 6.5% pay rise and a written limit on overnight staffing cuts; Clairpont said it had offered further negotiations but would not withdraw its proposed rota changes.
