Payouts suspended as KYC for a South African Trust not recognised

[Daniel19]

I have been a superhost for over 9 years with mutiple listings and very high ratings. 

The properties are owned by my family trust and I am the trustee and my family is the beneficiary. My payouts were therefore going to my Trust account as this is the owner of the properties.

Airbnb does NOT have a trust option under account registration options. I was approached by what appears to be a BOT asking me questions about the trust, beneficial ownership and then asking a list of illogical questions. Its apparent Airbnb does not understand South African Trust Structures. The reseting of my account has now caused issues with the setteling bank as they have registered the reciever as being an individual but with a company name and so Bidvest will not accept this understandably.

I am desperate to resolve this. My payouts have stopped and no matter how many times I email and request assistance I am not able to speak to someone who can properly solve this.

Has anyone else experienced this? How did they solve it?

[Frances3408]

@Daniel19 . Hi Daniel, obviously I dont bank in SA and I'm no lawyer but here goes:

1. have you tried changing the bank name in payout info to just the company name (I assume this means your trust also has a corporate trustee and you are a director not just a personal trustee) so it matches Bidvest better? 

2. If you have a relationship manager at Bidvest I suggest you contact them and explain you arent getting paid due to the KYC mismatch. Perhaps their legal guys can make a suggestion.

3. Open a new bank account with another bank that might allow the corporate name only or at least first. Here thats how they name them. In my experience banks name trust accounts in all sorts of different ways and worse still, not all the info can be used in a funds transfer. 

Yes, platforms including Airbnb really dont understand trusts. At the end of the day its up to you to account for your income to the SA taxman.

Hope this helps.

[Glen846]

Hi, @Daniel19 

I am in EXACTLY the same boat and have been chasing airbnb support about it for 2 weeks now, they owe me (the trust) a bunch of money and staff need paying, etc. 

Did you ever manage to resolve this?

[Daniel19]

Hi @Glen2 

I am sorry to hear about your issue... I know the frustration...

Let me ask you, have you been asked to KYC the trust?

This is where it started for me. I received messages asking for details of the trust. Airbnb doesn't understand SA Trusts, nor is their platform setup to capture the right FICA details so this alone took me about a month of back and forth to explain and validate. The difference between a Trustee and a Beneficiary was not understood. Therefore they asked me the same questions about beneficial ownership and control for weeks as they couldn't understand why there was not a director and shareholder.

Eventually I seemed to get through this and the trust was approved as a owner of the properties. The next issue was the mandate from Bidvest bank. As a new mandate form needed to be completed and again as Airbnb's systems don't align with SARB Mandate forms they were sending the wrong info to Bidvest bank and so the online form kept on being rejected and the payouts where paused. 

I got into a endless loop messaging on the Airbnb platform and also to AZA Finance which is the appointed agent of Payoneer which is who Airbnb use for settlements and AZA is part of Bidvest Bank. I emailed the following email address mandates@bidvestbank.co.za . But still for weeks I got no resolution. Bidvest said Airbnb needs to correct the mandate and Airbnb said they have sent the mandate and its not their issue.

In the end I emailed the management team of Airbnb including Brian and within about 24 hours the money was settled. It seems like an instruction was sent to Bidvest and the rest has flowed since then. This was only resolved about 5 days ago. 

My suggestion would be to both create messaging thread on Airbnb but to also email mandates@bidvest as per above address. Given I faced the same difficulty I think they might be more on top of the issue now and you should get a better response. If not I am happy to supply the email addresses of the management team which was the only way I managed to get this resolved in the end.

Many Thanks 

Daniel

[Glen846]

Hi, @Daniel19.

Yes, the issue started with the KYC process for the trust. I don't recall how it worked in previous years but I've always just operated on my personal profile with the payoneer mandates also being in my name (I think). The bank account that they were paying into belongs to the trust though, but was never an issue.

This month I received a request to do KYC and I think at some point there was a prompt about the bank account appearing to belong to a business. So I went through the form and selected "business" as, as you know, there is no "trust" option. They then followed up a while later requesting business registration docs for the trust.

I explained no such thing exists, but I could send the trust's SARS IT registration, which would show all relevant information. They sent an upload link, I uploaded the SARS doc and never heard back. A few days later I checked the message with the link and it turns out they actually had requested the Letter of Authority.

Nonetheless the link accepted my docs and after a call to support said they'd review them. That was 3 weeks ago. At the time it was supposed to take 24-72 hours. Since then I've called support daily and been escalated every time. Then I get notification of a new open support case with their little flow chart and it gets closed out in a day or two. 

Today I received a link for the KYC process but the link leads to a page that just says "thanks for filling in your info". It's the same page I got when I filled out their online KYC form the first time. I can't change anything about the info, I can't go back to a personal profile instead of a business profile. 

I go back to support, shout at them, get promised it'll be escalated to the correct team. Rinse and repeat. 

I'm now at the point where I've lost too much cash flow to continue accepting longer term bookings. I'm making use of Lekkeslaap and direct bookings instead.

I emailed mandates@bidvest last week on the advice of our local airbnb community advisor. No response though.

If you could please DM me those email addresses that'd be greatly appreciated. 

[Tim4395]

Hi Glen,

Ive been enduring this KYC nightmare for a month now...

Would you be so kind as to send me the e-mail address for the above Airbnb contacts if you were able to get them ?

Cheers,

Tim

[Dirk371]

Hi Daniel

Thank you for sharing. I have had countless support threads and calls with support, with each consultant having no knowledge of the details of my case or the history of discussion on open and closed threads. I was not asked for all the info from the beginning and now I had to add the beneficiaries to the beneficial ownership list. These beneficiaries do not however fall into their own definition of someone with more than 25% share and influence over the operation.

My payouts have been frozen for months and support takes days to weeks respond after I submitted information.\

Please send me an email address to escalate my case as well?

[Tim4395]

Hi Daniel,

I have been enduring this KYC pain for a month now (also a Trust), and have my payments frozen.

Today I was informed that all info has been obtained, but the review process will continue and that they will get back to me once complete !

Unacceptable to say the least.

Please can you supply me with the direct Airbnb e-mail addresses you made use of which helped you out ?

Cheers,

Tim

[Glen846 · Accepted solution]

I just wanted to update everyone on this thread about this issue as mine was resolved.

It took many many calls to airbnb support but eventually a competent support "ambassador" claimed that he knew exactly where to escalate my issue and that previous attempts had been unsuccessful because his colleagues escalated to the wrong department. He wouldn't give me a department name but said "specialised team that handles tax profiles".

They eventually got hold of me via a support message and said I needed to fill out their KYC form again for business. I explained that I'll do it but it will be incorrect as this isn't a company, it's a trust, bla bla bla.

Their response was "we know, but this is the only way our system can process it. So just give each trustee a % ownership". We have 3 trustees of which only one is an acting trustee so he got 50% and the other two got 25%. Two days later my payments came through and the issue was resolved.

Hopefully this means Airbnb have cottoned onto this particular issue and will handle it in this manner going forward.

I've been made to understand by other people who work with trusts that interact with online platforms that trusts are unpopular because their structures vary by jurisdiction compared to companies. So you have to have a special KYC protocol just for SA trusts if you're Airbnb, which is asking too much.

Hope this helps anyone reading with the same issue!