Green Dot apologizes for card outage

Prepaid debit card issuer Green Dot Corp. acknowledged Tuesday that technical issues have kept many customers from using their cards, something the company denied last week.

Customers, including many holders of Wal-Martbranded debit cards issued by Green Dot, took to social media last week to complain that they were unable to pay bills, make purchases or withdraw cash from ATMs.

At the time, Green Dot Chief Executive Steve Streit said all cards were “working normally” and that the only problem was that some customers were unable to check account balances.

But in a Facebook post Tuesday afternoon, the company said several technical issues over the last week “have impacted the ability of some cardholders to use their cards.”

The company said it hoped to have all problems fixed by this weekend and that it would put extra money into the accounts of customers who were unable to use their cards “as our way of trying to apologize and make things better.”

The post came a day after Green Dot’s annual shareholder meeting, during which Streit survived a campaign to boot him from the company’s board.

An activist shareholder, San Francisco’s Harvest Capital Strategies, had earlier this year called for Green Dot to fire Streit, saying he had mismanaged the company, which he founded and has led since 1999. In March, Harvest started a campaign to oust Streit from the company’s board.

Preliminary results of a shareholder vote taken at Green Dot’s annual meeting Monday show Streit is likely to keep his board seat.

But two other board members Harvest sought to replace — Silicon Valley investor Michael Moritz and Orange County private equity investor Timothy Greenleaf — resigned over the weekend, clearing the way for two Harvest nominees to join the board.

They are Nino Fanlo, president of fast-growing San Francisco lending firm SoFi, and George Gresham, a former finance chief of rival prepaid card issuer NetSpend.

Final results of Monday’s shareholder vote will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission next week, the company said.

james.koren@latimes.com