Charities Aid Foundation Reviews 152

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)!

Unfortunately despite helpful staff (when you get through to them) currently their phone message since 9am says call back later. They haven't responded to emails either. I appreciate they are swamped, but currently I cannot pay our suppliers as the person authorising can't gain access.
To top it off, the 'historical transactions' are showing the dates out of order, with no way of sorting, and the balances are incorrect. I can no longer connect to QuickBooks, none of our group payees have been brought over (which requires adding them again, and the new group template will not allow selection of beneficiaries yet. To top it off user interface wise it's actually worse than the last platform!
This is not down to the staff, but the developers and it is an absolute mess. It clearly wasn't ready to launch. Had no updated emails from CAF as to progress.

CAF launched a new online banking system on Monday. I had previously received an email with a username, informing me that my temporary password would be sent by SMS. I waited until launch day but still no password. I called CAF customer services at various times on Monday and Tuesday to learn that they weren't accepting phone calls. There was simply a recorded greeting telling customers to call back later. Presumably they had messed up the launch of the new system on such a massive scale that they were being inundated with more calls than they could manage. Today, on Wednesday, they are now accepting calls. In the time I have been waiting, I have done my dishes, cleaned the kitchen, cooked and eaten a meal, responded to correspondence, and set up a charity fundraiser. At the time of writing, I have been waiting for 2 hours and 14 minutes. Tomorrow, I am expecting news that means my charity will need to engage in a number of financial transactions, so I cannot wait for the 5-day estimate turnaround on their online support form that I filled in on Monday.

EDIT: I was connected shortly after submitting this review. It turns out the reason I didn't receive the SMS with my password is because they sent it to my old phone number. I changed my number in January last year and updated it with CAF. They have been successfully sending me messages to my new number for 15 months, but for some reason, with this new online banking system, they have managed to dig out my old number from somewhere and use that instead. The only positive thing about the whole experience was the agent who immediately identified and resolved both this problem and the problem that led to my last review of CAF.

In the past two weeks they completely messed up the transfer of account holder for our charity, leading to me spending nearly two hours talking to people who never seemed to have the full picture. Just got that sorted and the 'upgrade' is turning into a complete mess, meaning I can't make payments which are due. Have made repeated attempts to activate my new user ID and password today, without success. Unable to get any response to phone calls.

New, more up-to-date online banking system from CAF is very welcome but they've had days of issues with it. Can't log on and when you call for assistance you get cut off every time. Not really good enough!

Our charity's bank accounts are with CAF Bank. We've been told that from 12 May 2025, funds will no longer sweep automatically between our current account and savings account. We'll have to make the transfers manually or risk incurring charges. This is changing a system that's worked well for us for years and will be a complete pain for no discernable benefit. The only explanation is "We are working on improvements to our online banking service to make everyday banking tasks easier", which seems disingenuous.

With much patience and assistance from my IFA I have have set up a foundation account here to help the charities which are so necessary. The experience of setting up the foundation was slow but I hoped that once I was on the portal it would improve. Sadly this is not the case. The home screen indicates I have a substantial cash balance from which to make donations. Go to the donate now screen and apparently I am overdrawn. Proceed anyway and receive an email that I have indeed made a donation. Account has no record of it. At some point we might hear from the CEO. Unless the situation improves dramatically, I will not be making any further donations via this portal and certainly be advising other philanthropists to avoid them.

[We have just sent a six digit CAF Bank UniqueCode to your phone number]

Oh ok I'll just pop that in before getting on with my review... Ok. My experience with CAF has been that it is not so much red tape, but red superglue, sticking into every crevice it can find itself. It has—

[We have just sent a six digit CAF Bank UniqueCode to your phone number]

Again? Right, right, one second. Ok, done. It has been an ordeal to do the simplest thing, from approving payments to finding a useable bank statement, and heaven forbid you want to make a larger change such as adding/changing an authorised memb—

[We have just sent a six digit CAF Bank UniqueCode to your phone number]

Sigh. Ok. Fine. Here's the code. As I was saying, the amount of things that must be done through paperwork beggar belief, and—

[We have just sent a six digit CAF Bank UniqueCode to your phone number]

Unfortunately, CAF, I have only four digits for you.

Friendly and helpful staff but a terribly outdated bank. Any time you want to change something, paper forms have to be signed. For us that means sending forms around the country for different signatories to sign. Then CAF deny that they've ever received the documents so you have to do the whole rigmarole again, but this time paying for registered post. We continually have foreign payments rejected which has cost us our relationship with donors. Agree with everything else that's been said. Salaries are paid at about 7pm, staff want to help but often don't know how. It's desperately outdated, the charges are expensive and if I had the time and energy to move banks then I would.

I donated to Amnesty. I had a regular newsletter. I notified CAF when I changed address. The newsletters stopped. When I tried to cancel my donation they couldnt find my address. The 3 people I dealt with were not fit for purpose. The same as this company. You are better off donating straight to the charity rather than pay wages to uneducated and unhelpfull school leavers. The One Star is for cosmetic purpose only.

Getting a new user account set up and logging in successfully takes months. All new users are initially blocked when they try to login due to some bug in the security handling. Reversing this is difficult as the CAF staff don't know what causes it or how to reverse it. Many phone calls later, with new user, user administrator and CAF person all on the call and eventually it works. Until you put a toe wrong logging in and you're blocked again. Note this is a block, at the CAF end, not something the user administrator can reverse despite CAF's protestations.

UPDATE: CAF introduced a new baking system this year. It is not an improvement. Looks like it's been written by a 12-year old doing "my first computer program". Actually no, if it had been it would be better than it is. Most of the old frustrations are still there, including persistent difficulties logging in. Why can't they get that right? Even the opening screen image isn't scaled properly, so no quality control. Latest insult is that they have introduced a bug so you can't use any browser except Chrome on Windows 11. We have thus been forced to revert to Windows 10. Shocking beyond belief.

How can a modern bank make people wait until early evening on payday to receive their salary payments. The money clearly leaves the account in the early hours of the morning, but then sits somewhere until early evening.

If you are considering opening a charity account - do not do so with CAF.

On every level, CAF is frustrating to deal with, not at all customer focused and stuck in the dark ages (particularly with their digital offering and the assumption that people know CAF bank is a different organisation to CAF Donate). They appear to be riding on a legacy reputation which has no bearing on the service customers receive today.

I could write War and Peace about how terrible their service offering is across the organisation but in summary: there are much better options out there and if you do open an account with them, it won't be long before you seriously regret it.

I have been a CAF Bank customer for almost 20 years, both personally and professionally, but I regret to say that I could not recommend them today. Years of poor leadership have made this a bank that has fallen too far behind its competitors. They have made the fatal error of employing poor customer service representatives, who are too often rude and argumentative. Furthermore, payment processing times are exceptionally slow. The online banking system is clunky, unclear and archaic and the bank has been very slow to adopt security measures, such as the 'Confirmation of Payee' system. I hope the abysmal reviews that this bank is receiving will jolt them into serious action. The charity sector needs and deserves a trustworthy and understanding bank with excellent customer care.

The bank is very slow in resolving problems. For example our charity has waited 25 days and is still waiting to receive back a foreign payment that was rejected by the recipient's bank. Also the bank's annual review of our charity's bank account in 2022 was very long and cumbersome and at the end of it, the bank unjustifiably threatened to close down the charity's bank account. Our charity raised a complaint and the bank was forced to apologize.

An absolutely shocking organisation when it comes to handling a bereavement and dealing with the legal executors. Total lack of empathy, refused to provide executors any information and hide behind their TOB.

Clearly as an organisation they have no vulnerable client policy. If bound by normal banking legislation they would fail 100% in their "Duty of Care and how they deal with vulnerable clients"

Every institution that use CAF for charity gifting, should review their dealings with this organisation and its ethical behaviour. Based on my experience they are anything but a charity and certainly from what I see lack any purpose other than their own.

Archaic practises, extremely challenging to operate it fast-moving international charity/development contexts with CAF. Still relying on pen and paper for certain operations. Poorly executed online portal, no app or mobile-friendly website.

Team on the phone are friendly but frequently inform of the wrong thing, which further conversations then clarify, meaning I would recommend 3 different calls to 3 different team members to get to 1 serviceable answer. Waste of time, unnecessarily expensive.

Cannot understand why anyone would stay with this bank after trying any other bank's services. We certainly won't be. Such a shame, but CAF is just a name.

No single element of their operations has been of benefit to our organisation, and despite extremely high interest rates for the last 2 years, we're still paying them for the pleasure.

Software problems, staff contradicting each other, (albeit politely) consistent access and payment issues, no joined up thinking internally. Disappointed, leaving promptly after years of hoping they would modernise. A bank of past days, clearly not able to keep up-to-date with the competition. Go somewhere else, there are plenty of other banks.

Very unhelpful, bureaucratic (everything apparently has to be done by post), unwilling to listen - it felt as if the call handler was smirking as she told me I would have to redo and resubmit the paperwork - unfortunately I was left with the impression that they could not care less about the customer