Russell Simmons Calls RushCard Catastrophe ‘Devastating’

Russell Simmons

Simply put, Russell Simmons has not taken the recent RushCard catastrophe lightly. For the past few weeks, Simmons’ named has been plagued with negative headlines, reporting on how the card’s planned migration to a new transaction processing company ended in a disaster. In short, it caused a system wide outage, preventing a number of RushCard holders from accessing their funds. In an interview with HipHopDX, Simmons (who founded the pre-paid debit card company) says:

It was one of the most devastating times in my adult life. I know how hard people work to get money. I know how damaging it could be if people were not able to get to their money. It’s true that we built almost a virtual bank. We built a company that people relied on for everything, from automatic bill pay to early direct deposit to transferring money to family members. We know that this was a very big thing. When transferring processors, we had a crash. That crash set off a tsunami, so a lot of things happened as a result of it. We had hundreds of people working on it and it’s just now over the last two weeks back to normal as far as the services we offer.

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