Act Globally, Regret Locally

Many years ago, on a none-too-clean boat touring Donegal Bay, my husband and I sat near a mother with five kids. The youngest was a babe in arms, maybe four or five months old. At some point, the binky – or, as the Irish would have it, the dummy – popped out of the baby’s mouth and landed on the scow’s none-too-clean floor. The baby’s mam didn’t miss a beat. She leaned over, scooped the binky up off that none-too-clean floor, stuck it in her mouth, sucked on it for a couple of seconds, and put it back in the baby’s mouth.

Jim and I laughed. Now there was an experienced mother, not worrying about germs and my kind of gal with respect to the 10-second rule.

(The other good binky story I have is about when my sister Trish decided that it was time for her daughter – then two and change, I think – to surrender her binky collection. The deal made with Molly was that she’d leave her binkies out for the Easter Bunny, and he’d give her a basket full of goodies in return. This was all very reasonable to Molly, who dumped her binkies and didn’t look back. Or so it seemed until a few weeks later when Molly looked around one evening and asked, “What happened my binkies?”)

Anyway, whether you call it a pacifier, a dummy, or a binky, those little plastic suckers are godsends for many parents.

But, as that young Irish mother knew, pacifiers do tend to hit the deck with regularity.

I have noticed that there are workarounds to this. I’ve seen pacifiers incorporated in a stuffed animal that’s presumably easier for a baby to hang on to. And, more practically, seen tethers that attach the binky to the side of a stroller so that when it falls (or is spit) out of a baby’s mouth, it doesn’t land on the ground.

Then there’s the Pop, the brain child of a designer that was brought to market by Nicki Radzely, a New Jersey mother/entrepreneur whose company Doddle offers a new-fangled pacifier which, on its way from mouth to floor, turns from an outie to an innie. This keeps the pacifier clean and reusable without having to sterilize it (or have it sucked clean by the mother). Genius!

The Pop is pricey. One costs about $10 (vs. the non-cleaner pacifiers which go for a buck or two). But Doddle’s business was going along quite nicely. It was selling a lot of Pops in yupscale places like Nordstrom’s and the Cooper-Hewitt museum shop.

And then a few weeks ago, Radzely got a call from her bank (a JPMorgan Chase branch) asking her if she was doing any business with North Korea.

Now, I wouldn’t put it past man-child Kim Jong Un if he pacified himself occasionally with a little hit on a Doddle Pop. But the idea of a $10 binky finding a market in an “economy” that can’t afford to feed its own people is pretty much laughable. So when Radzely got the call from her bank, she laughed.

The day after the call, the humor was gone, and Radzely:

…discovered that her business ATM card wouldn’t work. A teller told her the account appeared to have been blocked. Radzely set up a second call with her JPMorgan Chase business banker, who said the bank had decided to end its relationship with Doddle. Radzely says she was told to come in and pick up a cashier’s check for roughly $150,000. (Source: Bloomberg)

This has left Radzely in a lurch. Bankless – until and unless her application to open an account at a Citibank branch is approved - she can’t pay her bills or her payroll. And Radzely hasn’t been able get a straightforward answer from JPMorgan on why they tossed Doddle on its ear.

JPMorgan hasn’t shared details about what raised the red flag over the Doddle account. Radzely says her only clues are her banker’s email indicating JPMorgan’s back office needed more information about “transactions that have gone through your account,” followed by the questions over the phone about North Korea. But she says her banker did not directly tie the decision to close Doddle’s account to North Korea or anything else. One warning flag may be China, where Doddle’s products, like those of many American businesses, are manufactured.

Oopsa doopsa. The China connection.

“There are many issues with China circumventing North Korean sanctions,” says Joe Salerno, who runs Financial Compliance & Investigative Services, a consulting firm in Lafayette Hill, Pa., that works with financial institutions. “Most banks are very reluctant to talk to a customer if they believe it’s been involved in suspicious activity.” Whatever is behind JPMorgan’s move, the turn of events at Doddle offers an illustration for millions of businesses about how, in an era when electronic payments are the lifeblood of almost every enterprise, financial institutions can sever them at a moment’s notice.

Radzely’s hunch is that something went off track with a “$2,700 wire payment for safety testing in China” that involved the wrong name of a company, and Radzely having her manufacturer pay the testing company and reimbursing them for it later. But she doesn’t know for sure whether it’s this or something else. And she isn’t getting an answer from JPMorgan. They just cut off their relationship with Doddle.

Banking relationships are, it seems, at will. So JPMorgan is within its rights to let Doddle go. But it seems pretty ridiculous for a bank with trillions of dollars worth of assets, and tens of billions of dollars worth of income, to come down on a small business like Doddle. And to do it so abruptly and with no explanation.

If it is the China-North Korea connection, why not call in the Doddlers and tell them they might want to take another look at the manufacturer that they deal with. Or whatever.

But I guess it’s easy enough to stand up to the little guy with a binky in its mouth, and be able to point it out to the Feds as an example of how scrupulously they pursue bad actors. Wonder if they’re so assiduously – and so precipitously dumping – household word organizations they have business relationships with.

I understand why Doddle’s manufacturing its Pops in China. Where better to produce plastic crap? But it’s not the first – or the last – example of acting locally turning into a case of regretting things locally.

Hope it all works out for them. Hate to think of moms having to revert to sucking clean a binky that’s fallen on a filthy boat floor.