The short answer is that transactions are sometimes getting denied because of a combination of secured funds and a backup of pending items that are waiting to be posted. When an authorization comes in, CU*BASE reviews the account and approves the transaction based on the member’s available balance. To avoid approving something we shouldn’t, CU*BASE always calculates the available balance minus any transactions that are currently in the queue, waiting to be posted. Unfortunately, if the transaction queue gets backed up due to unusually busy traffic, it can take a few minutes longer than usual to post all waiting transactions, and this could result in a member being denied incorrectly.

It’s primarily a timing thing, based on the volume of activity being received at a given moment in time. There are times when both MasterCard and Visa send us large batches of transactions all at once, and this can have an effect on CUs with very high volumes of overall EFT activity, especially near the beginning of the month or when there is a holiday. Once the queue clears, transactions are authorized and processed as normal.