CAF Bank Reviews 

Total operational chaos!
Recent, so-called "upgrades" and ongoing online banking blackouts have locked charities and organisations out from accessing their money, bringing admin to a complete standstill.

As a charity ourselves, we've been completely unable to check incoming payments and have been forced into making late payments to beneficiaries.
With no access to the website we were directed to calling CAF on the phone for assistance, however the telephone helplines are entirely overwhelmed! I was left trapped on hold for hours with no answer.
To top it all off, their automated text message system is a complete shambles, with administrators, trustees and volunteers being woken up by glitchy automated text alerts in the middle of the night (like 3:40 AM!) warning of "new beneficiaries" that were actually created weeks ago!! This bank shows complete contempt for the thousands of non-profits and Charities relying on them.

Unprofessional, unreliable, and an absolute threat to people's payrolls, payments and community services in general.

I am appalled that a bank that 14,000 charities rely on can be down for this long. After 6 hours on hold yesterday to simply process payroll I was told by Ros that she would call me the following morning between 9 and 10 to action. We have received no call, we aren't able to call you because we were 120 in the queue. We are now in a position where people's mortgages might not get paid, our suppliers may refuse to work with us and deliver services, and as a minimum I have lost a day and a half of essential work for our charity and the people we support. This is appalling and significant action must be taken to address the current situation and ensure it never happens again.

This really is the most appalling bank I have ever experienced. The latest now is that the website is down for an undetermined period of time - this could be hours or days. It is has been sheer misery since the roll out of the new website over a year ago now. I think the CEO and other staff realistically need to be fired for this abysmal offering.

It's been taking several minutes just to pay/authorise invoices for days with screens freezing and not knowing if the transaction is going though or not. It seems that whenever they do work on their system, there are problems and doing maintenance work during office hours when customers are trying to use the system is not very clever.

(Later received emails re security breach which explains things.)

So the site has been down all day with no warning or explanation - can only assume something disastrous has occurred. I'll be voting with my feet once this latest debacle is resolved (and they still haven't got bulk payments right!)

Extremely bad customer service.
We uploaded all documents and no one contacted us to confirm.
A while after I called them and they told me that they are very busy and it takes 6 weeks get to our documents and about 5-6 weeks to get the account running if no complications.
I don't trust them as it all looks like no one is there to help you in case of need.
Avoid!

Have had a terrible experience with all aspects of a large retail bank, our Trust moved to CAF Bank. I have found the opposite when speaking to people at CAF Bank as we opened an online account - polite, very helpful and very effective. I appreciate they have had difficult times, but courteous behaviour is so much better than the lack of response or interest from our previous bank.

Unuseable system. Supposedly an upgrade in June. 3 months later due to their "upgrade" as a charity we can no longer adhere to Charity Financial Regulations or indeed Financial Regulations, and assign receipts to the to correct invoice or customer. it appears that CAF bank if the payee also bank with them, they think it is ok to quote the payee bank account details in the reference, rather than the actual reference given (such as an Invoice Number). They are not willing to accept this is a major flaw in what is now a poor bank. They do not respind to emails or requests for compensation

I had initially left a negative review written out of pure frustration.
Today, I have spoken to Roxanne who has been more than helpful in trying to get us back on the system.
The staff really are working to the max to get things up and running on a system, with errors, but none of which are their fault.
We are not there yet, but progress has been made.
CAF, I apologise for my initial rant.

Everything that every other customer has complained about, i have pretty much had the same issues with. I waited patiently for 1 hour and 58 minutes last Thursday for my call to be connected. Eventually it was, and the lady who helped and assisted me was great. Her name was Shona and she was an absolute star, talked through all my queries and did her best to help resolve them. I do feel sorry for the front line staff who are taking all the flack from callers but they are learning the new software just like customers are. A big thank to Shona at CAF who helped me.

CAF Bank launched a new online system this week. They provided me with a new username but have failed to provide a password for me or my colleagues. We have no access to our bank account this week, and can not make payments which will soon be overdue. The CAF Bank telephone system has a recorded message saying they can not answer calls and please call back later. This is absolutely the worst service possible.

Some comments on the new Online Banking system....Why, oh why, have you removed the basic bank account format of credit and debit columns. Instead you have merged them into one column with positive and negative numbers. This means that downloads of transactions to put into my own accounts system need significant extra processing to split out that column into the usual two columns.
You have also changed the order of transactions - used to be oldest at top and newest at bottom...now it is reversed. Once again a significant impact on end user systems.
I've had to manually sort out "historical transactions" between 2nd June and 6th June - the data provided was not in date order but was all scrambled up.
On-line statements are not available post April 2025...I wait to see what these are like - hopefully a credit and debit column version like we used to receive (and which all other banks produce)!