Direct Merchants Bank •Application Fees •Change of Address Policy •Collection Policies •Customer Service •"Credit Protection" •Interest Rates •Late Fees • Late Posting of Payments •Over-Limit Fees •Preying on the Disabled • "Rate Reward" •Secured Credit Cards •Security Policies •Disappearing Funds •Telemarketers •An Insider's View

On Oct. 22, 2000, Greg of Towson, MD, wrote:
I was a Collection Supervisor for Direct Merchants Bank (Metris Companies). I see on this web site an alarming amount of complaints waged against Direct Merchants and being myself originally from the inside, I can honestly say that there is considerable truth to these allegations. I also understand and agree with many such complaints.

Many of these complaints were regarding blatant violations of the laws pertaining to the FDCPA. The Collection staff did unfortunately call customers at unreasonable time frames; such an example would be after 9:00pm EST (this can be backed up.) There has and have been several complaints waged by customers against certain collection staff members regarding harrassment, intimidation and blatant unscrupulous behavior that in normal circumstances would have warranted immediate termination but these individual(s) were either never spoken to or the issue(s) were swept under the rug mainly in part due to the high Collection percentage of balances resolved so they were protected. I personally was witness to many of these coverups.

The next thing that concerned me as it did many of our customers was the excessively high interest rates, some as high as 29%. The mature card holder who was or is on a fixed income could never possibly pay down a balance with those rates. Many customers were being charged for protection plus (fee) and after cancelling the card, interest on this fee for this service that several customers even denied authorizing or being aware of would accumulate to hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

I'm just sorry for these customers. Metris Companies claims to be a great place to work but undoubtedly it appears to be a lousy place to do business per these complaints and the countless complaint calls that I and other supervisors have received on a daily basis. I along with the cardholders were and are frustrated with the company's apparent inability to resolve or solve internally the source of these problems. I'm not a customer of Metris Companies (Direct Merchants Bank) merely due to the unreasonable interest rates that they charge. No discounts for employees.

On Nov. 14, 2000, James of Baltimore wrote:
I am currently an employee with Metris Companies, a sub of Direct Merchants Bank. When I started in 1999, I was very pleased with the company. They valued the employees and it was really a family environment. In July of last year they gave everyone 2 raises to promote the company and be competetive with other banks. That's that when the morale started going down. They started terminating employees for stupid reasons and they really stopped caring about the employees or the customers.

They are so disorganized. There departments don't communicate with each other. One will send out a memo one day saying what you can't do ... and the very next another manager will send out a memo saying you can.

They have the worst computer system. All customer service and collection reps work off of five different systems. The first one is FDR (First Data Resources), which is very slow and generic. The next one is Fingerhut AS400 database(which is used to open new accounts); RMS (Recovery Managment Systems) which is used by recovery collectors;, Metris Quickcheck (which is the check by phone system); Davox and Millita autodialers.

None of their software talks to each other which makes it hard when you try to assist a customer.

If you oppose metris in any way you will find yourself terminated. They terminate by calling you into the office and while you're in there with everyone looking they bring out a brown box and pack your stuff up. Then they walk you out in front of everyone, give you the box and escort you to the door.

Everyone there is afraid that they will lose their job for something stupid. There are other jobs but Metris pays almost all their employees starting $25-30k plus bonuses and overtime. I know employees that make $50-85 k yearly.

Metris (Direct Merchants) does not care about the employees and they sure don't care about the customers. They don't care if you are a good customer or bad, they are not in competion for your business only for your money so they can collect on 28.99% intrest.

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