Charities Aid Foundation Reviews 

Actually, I would rate as zero stars if that was an option. After more than three weeks only only one of our four signatories can login semi-reliably. Similar to other reviewers, I was locked out for trying to use the login details more than once - they never worked first time. Each time I managed to get through on the 'phone, after at least an hours wait, I was given a new temporary password, which, guess what, only worked once. email messages repeatedly said that someone would respond, in initially three days (when given another temporary password) then 5days (given ANOTHER temporary password!). My colleague works full time, and can't phone in during office hours, even if she could afford to spend an hour plus in a phone queue. And CAF have managed to change our account name, so that now when I try and explain the problems, what they think (for some reason) is the account name is NOT what I know it should be. Total shambles, and so unfair on volunteers and charities.

I wholeheartedly agree with other reviewers about the chaos and distress the new banking system has caused.

However, I finally managed to get through to a young man called Jordan and I have to say he was fantastic. He was patient, caring, knowledgeable and professional. I truly cannot praise him enough. If anyone at CAF is reading this, please note that Jordan is an absolutely credit to your organisation. If you have any kind of in-house awards or bonus system, he thoroughly deserves to be top of the list.

Gina Smith
The Bristol Commonwealth Society

Please complain to the Financial Ombudsman

Not much to add to all previous reviews however we are appalled by the incompetence of CAF Bank. The new system and customer service is not fit for purpose, with very serious repercussions.

We haven't been able to access out accounts or process payments for a number of days. It seems that they are no longer taking phone calls either 'we cannot take your call at this time'.

We are therefore unable to pay people or companies that have invoiced us. We shall be moving our account to another bank as soon as we are able and suggest others do the same.

Revd Ben Bell, Rector. St George the Martyr, Borough.

Just to add to the many comments already made, the scale of the problem is far far greater than is suggested by the few emails from the company would suggest. As i write this i am unable to contact customer services even though I was prepared for the two hour wait.
A quick list of problems.; Bulk payments are not fit for purpose as new payees cannot be added. This means individual payments for any new payee, we cannot access our historical data as the historical data feature does not work so i cannot actually see the transactions from more than a day ago. Direct debits have failed and in one case has gone out from our bank but not been received by the payee. Payments have gone to HMRC and Pension provider without references and even though this issue was known about, no one thought to put out a message to this effect (we could have delayed payments until the issue was fixed !) The one bulk payment we mad, only some of the payments went through. I am receiving text messages for every payment but the text messages are many hours after the payment and has nothing to identify which payment it is referring to. Every payment requires multiple one time passcodes and these fail to come though on time fairly frequently often requiring the payment to be set up again or for the screen to freeze and having to crash out and go through a 5 minute process to relog back in after passing a frustrating "capture" test. The site on mobile has many features missing so I was unable to complete some tasks whilst away on holiday (bulk payments and permissions are not showing on mobile) These are just the issues Im aware of at the moment and in fact it is every single thing I have tried to do on the system that has failed.
It is clear that this system was barely tested before going live and there doesn't seem to have been any customer testing or feedback as anyone who had actually tried to use this system would have pointed out many of the problems with the system even if it worked as intended. Im not sure what the future is for caf bank now. The system is so far away from being ready that I cannot see these issues being resolved within the next few months so unless they can roll back to the previous online banking system then I think most customers will have left.
Caf need to inform its customers of all the problems that they are aware of and an anticipated timeline for these to be resolved. From the tone of the emails received so far it seems they are hopelessly unaware of the magnitude of the issue.

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.

Absolutely wreckless for them to go live on a new system that is not fit for purpose. Throwing all their customer's into a state of frustration, confusion and wasting hours and hours of our time. I am absolutely disgusted since the go live day.

I think the point has now been reached that, as soon as some semblance of viable operation has been reached (like the balances are correct...) , CEO Alison Taylor MUST take responsibility and resign if she wants to retain a shred of professional integrity.
It's what CEO's must do in situations as dire as this.

This much touted new banking system is an utter failure and now what used to be an hours work putting on payments now takes 2.5hrs and then your subject to a text for every single payment even though its been authorised. A total shambles!
Whoever was tasked to roll this rubbish out should do the only right thing and resign.
We had to run payroll for our charities 13 staff last week, took ages to put into 'bulk payment' (why they chose such a stupid name goodness only knows).
Did pay arrive to our staff.. no!!
we had to issue cheques and allow time for them to get to their bank, but oh joy when we logged in the next day, just to see we have been charged for issuing cheques at £1 each due to CAF Banks amazing incompetence pushing through a system without fully test driving it just to meet a deadline. Dont blame their IT guys as it was probably outsourced to India to save a few quid, blame the management for such a total balls up and showed what they thought of us as customers.
WE ARE NOW LOOKING TO OPEN ANOTHER BANK ACCOUNT AS CAF HAS LOST OUR TRUST.

Awful problems with the new system. We are unable to access the bank at all now to authorise payments and cannot telephone as they keep asking you to call back later, with no waiting facility! Shocking.

Reaching customer service for even little things is getting impossible after the upgrade. Our charity waited for 2 hours, yet no luck getting through.

We are depending on this bank for daily banking and unable to do so. Either the bank is not capable of handling high volumes are there is genuinely other problems with the banking platform.

We are considering to move to other high street banks which are more accessible.

Really shame that CAF Bank has gone terribly bad.

I wish the senior leadership team looks into this matter as a matter of urgency and fix the issue.

Waiting for 2 hours to get through to customer service in this modern era of AI is just unacceptable and a joke!

Mulitple, compounding serious problems with the new Caf bank system.
The text server is overloaded, so the log on text arrives after login has timed out. After three attempts you are logged out and have to call them, but their phone support is totally overloaded all day, every day (and only 9-5 weekdays). Even their on-line compaints system fails. The help lines are massively understaffed. The on-line account reset doesn't work, because it requires a text (from the server than delivers a text after login has timed out !) It's just broken.
Avoid this Bank at all costs.

Shambolic. That’s the only word to describe CAF Bank. Whoever is responsible for this shambles should be made to come spend an hour or two at a charity like ours just to get an understanding of how much upset and extra work they’ve caused. We’ve 26 staff who I ‘paid’ on Tuesday except only 9 staff were actually paid. The other 17? No idea what’s happened to their payments, lost in the banking ether. I’ve given up trying to call CAF because you’re either number 31 in the queue or they simply tell
you to call back later and cut you off. How is this acceptable? It just beggars belief tbh. I had no choice but to pay the 17 staff again today even though I’ve no idea what’s happened to the other payment I made. I’ve emailed them AGAIN but just get a ‘we’ll get back to you in 5 working days’. I’m off away for a few days, I bloody well need it after the stress of the last few days.

I thought I would give it three weeks before writing a review, just in case they could fix things. Unfortunately earlier today I could sign in but not set up any payments. Now I can't even sign in. This really is so poor. It's 5:05 and the phone lines are off.....

Three days on from my review and our authorise signatures are finding all OTPs fail to work...

As a volunteer Church treasurer I have to fit my role around a full time job and family life, and have been happy to do so.

CAF bank used to support this and the odd call late in the afternoon was doable with a helpful customer team. After the recent changes it is actively making this impossible to manage, meaning I am forced to do a bad job on all 3 facets: real job / family / volunteering. The knock on consequences are not just for the charities and if this was properly understood it would not have happened.

1. The new text message alerts for approval when it used to be email based mean I am disturbing other volunteers when I set up payments early in the morning or late at night. Meaning I need to factor this in to when I can do certain tasks. When can this be turned off?

2. Sweep has been turned off with zero notice - with this in place I've historically been able to focus on productive work knowing that the Current account balance was taken care off and only worry about major payments. Now I need to actively monitor the account wasting time that could be more effectively spent and move money before it needs to be moved costing interest on our savings. When is this coming back?

3. Call Wait Times - Just called up support line this morning and I was #29 in the queue - I have to fit calling the helpdesk around a day job, luckily I work from home and have a bit of flexibility but there must be others facing the same with even tighter timelines. Why can't we request a call back? The people who can't wait 2hrs are probably the people who need the most help.

4. Other ongoing account changes have just been suspended - I've been trying to update some account details and just been told it is being paused. I can understand this for a few days around the transition but its been 3 weeks. We need these changes

5. More regular comms - We got an update on the 20th - what has happened since then.

Please don't post me a generic reply - I know there is a poor person on customer support who is struggling under the weight of feedback - this is not their fault

For now I would like
- someone in the tech team to update us on what is happening today, the order of priorities and when they will be fixed
- to know that customers are not being charged the monthly fee while these issues are ongoing
- I'd like to know how many real users were consulted before the changes were made? - who thought this was better?

*Thankyou to Ben for the call. That was appreciated. Still frustrated with the issues but fair play for listening*

Avoid this 'bank' at all cost if you can. After one successful login, it now does not work anymore, we can't authorise payments as the system does not recognise our details anymore. And the helpline? 'Call back later, we are not taking any calls now due to high volume of calls.'
Despite them saying 'wait times are coming down', the opposite is the case. After 6 days still not able to access our account and after being in queue position number 68 (I am not making this up), waiting until it's my turn, they hang up and then not accepting calls. That's 26.6.25 9 a.m. A financial institution for charities really should know that there are vulnerable people being negatively impacted by not receiving their funds.
This morning 30.6.25 our login resets went through, we're now able to log on.

Having had initial issues to set up on the new banking system, I eventually could access our accounts. Today however I am unable to log on - apparently the system can't send the one time code to my mobile - funny that as it has managed to do it since the changeover. I am advised to call the bank which I do to be told we are not taking any calls at the moment - please try later. Absolutely shocking Customer Service! The Chairman and CEO both need to resign as I presume they would have signed off a system that is quite obviously not fit for purpose!

I cannot believe how terrible the new so-called "better banking" is. What used to be a simple process to pay a group of people - selecting a pre-made list, ticking the ones you wanted, entering the amounts, clicking on "submit", now takes ages and requires lots of completely unnecessary steps. The bulk payment templates are a complete disaster. Fine if you make the same payments to the same group of people everytime, but impossible to adapt easily or quickly. I can't add new beneficiaries to a bulk payment - yes I'm told there will be a delay but I've been waiting a week. The search doesn't work. Multiple steps and wasted time to do something simple. Who on earth designed this process? Did they test it with actual users? I can't believe anyone said "hey, that's definitely better banking"! And that's before you try to download transactions from the site - what used to be a one click now requires editing of CSV files just to get it into a usable format. And what's with sending loads of text messages to every user late at night? Come on CAF, surely you can do better than this. Please (1) acknowledge the design mistakes made and (2) set our a roadmap / timescale for re-instating something that is usable and works. We are a small charity and our volunteers are not going to last for long when what took them minutes is now taking hours. This change is having real negative impact and needs to be addressed fast.

This banking upgrade from CAF has been a complete disaster. Not being able to make payments and with deadlines to meet for payments is annoying and embarrassing, having to pay out of my own pocket to avoid losing services we are committed to. Not able to get a response when calling for help and resorting to emails only to receive standard apologies just isn't good enough. 15 days and no ability to pay anyone.

The new portal and online banking process is very poor, indeed it is downright amateurish. I need to pay staff & suppliers, but having set up/requested the payments, the person approving has been unable to do so,or even to see clearly what he is trying to approve. One payment he believed he'd approved, is still showing as pending approval on my screen. Result, delayed payments, unhappy suppliers and a two hour wait to speak to someone for help. I am typing this whilst in queue postion 12. I have experienced other bank system transitions in previous existenses, but nothing that is as creaky, unclear, unintuitive or amateurish as this one. The email I received explaining there were teething problems, and asking me to hang on in there, does not really help. I would like to see when it is expected these problems will be fixed, not simply as soon as possible. Perhaps someone should explain, what was wrong with the old system and why it need changing. CAF is a great bank. Its staff are wonderful. This is a great shame.

Utterly appalling piece of system design. Inadequately tested and conceptually poor. As a counter-signatory it takes me 8 steps to check and approve each individual payment and I have to enter my 5-digit pin number every time. I have better things to do.