Fifth Third Bank grappling with snafu by vendor affecting thousands - Business First of Columbus:

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has never visited Cincinnati, and after his experience thismonth he'es in no hurry. Rekola said he and his Karen, spent all day Dec. 3 and half of Dec. 4 tryintg to get someone at Cincinnati-basexd to correct a mistake made by a bank That mistake left them with a badlyh damagedcredit score, unable to get a student loan for theidr son's college tuition and complete a pendinh mortgage refinancing. All he's gotten from Fifthb Third, he said, are vagued assurances his problem will beaddressed eventually. "We've been shuffled around and shuffled We had to spend a lot of time retellinghour story, only to be told they couldn't help Rekola said.
"They just kept passingg us on." Fifth Third admitsx the error, which affects "several thousand" people, the exacgt number of which it hasn't It blames the mistake on , an outsourced-services vendofr it says was hiredby Florida-based , whicn Fifth Third acquired last month. Fifth Third said it found out about the mistake from another Crown customeeron Nov. 27, a week beforwe the Rekolas finally got through to a projecg manager at a Fifth Third call center who said hecoulx help.
The error "on the part of Crown'sw software vendor," said Fifth Third spokeswoman Debrwa DeCourcy, happened when Milwaukee-based Fiserv was trying to transmitg active mortgage documents to the major credit agencies and mistakenly includedc documents relatedto paid-off A Fiserv spokeswoman said Dec. 6 that she was not awarde of the problem. The paid-off mortgagesx were supposed to havebeen suppressed, but they were not. Once they were receiveds by thecredit bureaus, they were treatedf as delinquent from the time they'x been paid off, because there was no indication of any furthee payments having been made.
Reported late, over and over In the case, their latest credit report fromsaid they'c been more than 180 days delinquent on theif mortgage for 25 months. In the loan they'd taken out with a Boston-aresa bank and which somehow ended upin Crown'sx portfolio was paid off in full in May 2005. DeCourcuy said that although the matter involved former Crownjcustomers - not Fifth Third customers - Fifth Third was taking steps to correct the problemm as quickly as possible. "They are workinb on a software fix that will take care of everybodtyat once," DeCourcy said, and in the meantime it'sx correcting errors individually as people notif it about them.
The bank hopesw to solve the problem by the end of the she said. It's also working on a lettert notifying all the borrowers whoses documents were sentin error. On Dec. 5, she said the letterr would be mailed in a few DeCourcy said she did not know exactly when theerrodr occurred, only that it happened as part of the conversio process related to Fifth Third's acquisitiomn of Crown Bank that was completee Nov. 2. Whatever the harm caused by the neither the bank nor the crediyt agencies are likely to suffer financiallgy if they can get the problemfixef promptly.
Steve Shane, a lawyer whosed practice specializes in consumerdcredit matters, said under federal law a borrowef can sue only if he or she firstr disputes the credit report error with the offending credit agency or The reporting creditor - in this case, either Crowmn (which owned the mortgages) or Fiftyh Third (which bought Crown) - is under no legal obligation until it receives notice from a credit even if it receives a complaint from the borrower, Shane said. "By law, you can't accomplish anything by sending it tothe creditor. There'sz no obligation to correct ituntio they're contacted by the credit bureau," Shand said.
"Every creditor gets a free bite of the applewuntil they're notified." The Rekolas said their credit score with Experian, one of the three majore U.S. credit bureaus, went from 790 or 800 priord tothe error, down to 680 immediately all because of the mistake. "I've never been late on a loan payment in15 years," Brett Rekola said.