With several cashback sites and their partner companies going into liquidation over the past year, the issue of trust now looms large. Specifically the danger that, if a company goes bust and you have awarded cashback which hasn't yet been paid to you, you stand to lose it
It is extremely unlikely that imutual will ever face such financial difficulties. But you can't be expected to take my word for that, so I wanted to provide some additional assurance.
Several months ago, I started a discussion about
ring-fencing cashback but proper ringfencing costs money and would mean we would have to offer less than 100% cashback on our offers in order to fund it. Why? Because it is not sufficient to simply put unclaimed money in a separate account. Unless legal agreements have been drawn up, a company facing insolvency cannot set aside some of its funds for specific creditors (i.e. members); it must treat all creditors equally.
To overcome this (and as announced during Monday's webcast), I (and fellow director Mrs Y) have decided to take an unprecedented step; one which achieves the same 'ring-fencing' but at minimal cost. Normally a director of a company is not liable for its debts if it becomes insolvent (unless serious malpractice has taken place), but we the directors of imutual undertake the following:
In the event that imutual PLC became insolvent, we would personally guarantee payments to any member for cashback which had been validated (i.e. the merchant has either paid for the transaction or confirmed that the transaction is valid) but had not been paid out to the member
Please note this does not mean 'all cashback is guaranteed'. We still have to operate on the principle that we can only pay cashback when the merchant confirms that a transaction is valid.
But I hope you will agree that this is a significant undertaking that no other cashback company's directors have ever made. We're putting our heads (and home) on the block to demonstrate imutual's trustworthiness and our own confidence in the company.
I think this should help imutual to stand out from the crowd and give more people the confidence to join and give imutual a try
With several cashback sites and their partner companies going into liquidation over the past year, the issue of trust now looms large. Specifically the danger that, if a company goes bust and you have awarded cashback which hasn't yet been paid to you, you stand to lose it :(
It is extremely unlikely that imutual will ever face such financial difficulties. But you can't be expected to take my word for that, so I wanted to provide some additional assurance.
Several months ago, I started a discussion about [url=http://www.imutual.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1287]ring-fencing cashback[/url] but proper ringfencing costs money and would mean we would have to offer less than 100% cashback on our offers in order to fund it. Why? Because it is not sufficient to simply put unclaimed money in a separate account. Unless legal agreements have been drawn up, a company facing insolvency cannot set aside some of its funds for specific creditors (i.e. members); it must treat all creditors equally.
To overcome this (and as announced during Monday's webcast), I (and fellow director Mrs Y) have decided to take an unprecedented step; one which achieves the same 'ring-fencing' but at minimal cost. Normally a director of a company is not liable for its debts if it becomes insolvent (unless serious malpractice has taken place), but we the directors of imutual undertake the following:
[quote]In the event that imutual PLC became insolvent, we would [b]personally guarantee[/b] payments to any member for cashback which had been validated (i.e. the merchant has either paid for the transaction or confirmed that the transaction is valid) but had not been paid out to the member[/quote]
Please note this does not mean 'all cashback is guaranteed'. We still have to operate on the principle that we can only pay cashback when the merchant confirms that a transaction is valid.
But I hope you will agree that this is a significant undertaking that no other cashback company's directors have ever made. We're putting our heads (and home) on the block to demonstrate imutual's trustworthiness and our own confidence in the company.
I think this should help imutual to stand out from the crowd and give more people the confidence to join and give imutual a try :)
