Anyone saved with Tandem?

eskbanker

Brynboy60 wrote: »

My first concern is the fact that I have to supply Tandem with my secure account access details, something that we are always warned not to do.

Exactly what 'secure account access details' are you referring to? If it's just the likes of sort code and account number (that are on every cheque you write/wrote) then that's obviously not a security issue, but if they were after passwords or something genuinely security related then that would be a different matter....

Brynboy60 wrote: »

I would be very worried about passing over my savings to a faceless organisation in an extremely cyber environment. I'd like some direct assurance from Martin Lewis that this bank is safe and above board...Martin, any comment please?

Apart from the rather sweet notion that Martin Lewis would personally read each of the millions of posts on these forums, MSE naturally point out at the foot of each page that they're a journalistic website, i.e. they have neither the desire nor the resources to conduct detailed due diligence on every company they mention, so they can't and won't give any 'direct assurance'.

Anyway, the main assurance you need when shopping around for somewhere safe for your money is FSCS protection, which guarantees your deposits in relevant institutions up to £85K. This includes Tandem, as you'll see at the foot of https://tandem.co.uk/fixed-saver.

However, MSE does recognise that some people are happier with more traditional high street providers and hence their inclusion at https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/savings-accounts-best-interest/#fixedsavings of:

Best 'Big Brand' Savings. While all the accounts above have the full £85,000 UK savings safety protection – you asked us to ensure there's a 'name you know' too.

so if you're "very worried about passing over my savings to a faceless organisation in an extremely cyber environment" and don't feel reassured by FSCS protection then it's entirely your prerogative to stick to more familiar names (with typically lower interest rates).

antrobus

Brynboy60 wrote: »

Hi, I'm very interested in a fixed savings account with Tandem. My first concern is the fact that I have to supply Tandem with my secure account access details, something that we are always warned not to do.
My second concern is that the experience of others on this forum doesn't fill me with confidence on the communication side of things. I would be very worried about passing over my savings to a faceless organisation in an extremely cyber environment. I'd like some direct assurance from Martin Lewis that this bank is safe and above board...Martin, any comment please?

Perhaps you will be reassured by the fact that TANDEM BANK LIMITED is simply the new name for HARRODS BANK LIMITED. It's been going since 1969.

It's regulated by the usual suspects, and has FSCS protection.

Been a consistent loss maker for years mind you. Which is presumably why Qatar wanted to offload it to Tandem who really, really wanted a banking licence.

DanOystar

Hi everyone.

I'm Dan from Oystar who did the bank charges single (I fought the Lloyds) with Martin about ten years ago. :money:

The funny thing is, I'm now working for a bank! :rotfl:

And that bank is... Tandem. :beer:

We're trying to be a good bank - or more specifically, we're trying to build a bank that is designed to win when our customers win, rather than profiting against them through nasty hidden fees and charges.

I'm working on social media and brand and I saw you had some unanswered questions here, so I wanted to jump in and answer some of them.

But firstly @1974Stephen - really upset to see you didn't get your Amazon vouchers ok. Can you contact me on social media (facebook.com/tandemmoney - with a direct message to the page) and I'll get you them straight away if you're still owed them. Terrible to see we've let down someone who was ready to recommend us - so I'd love the chance to put that right if it's not too late!

Stephen's second point about customer service being slow was a fair one and it's something that we've been working on. Since I arrived in the summer, we've almost doubled the size of the customer service team, we've also extended the hours that they are open and trained up an overload team for peak times and weekends that help us when we're struggling to respond in a timely way. Hopefully you'll be able to notice a difference now. (BTW Monday and Tuesday morning are the busiest times as that's when everyone seems to want to think about their money. If your call is not time sensitive, Thursday and Friday PM are the quieter times usually).

Chat was a total disaster when I got here as people expected an instant response, but often had to wait days. We've hired more people to deal with the demand, so response times are much better for most people now. When I arrived I saw some chats that hadn't been answered for over a week. Now the longest delay I can see is a matter of hours, but most chats are responded to quicker than that. It's a constant balancing act to get customer service right, so there'll be problems again when we have unexpected surges in growth, (Martin can crash most decent websites with a money saving recommendation) but I think we're much better prepared for even that going forward now.

A few specific points:

@dllive - I'll look into what you said about the "email me my details" link not working. Thanks for pointing that out.

@Brynboy60 - Hopefully I can help mitigate the sense that Tandem is a faceless organisation just by answering some questions here for you. We've grown to nearly 500k customers this year, roughly 3x what we were expecting, so you should hopefully start to see more of us in the newspapers and our cards in people's wallets in this coming year.

The CEO and co-founder Ricky Knox is an inspiring character who has brought a lot of the staff here with his vision of disrupting the traditional banking space and designing a bank to profit alongside its customers and not against them. If you google him, there should be a fair bit around by now. He's very passionate about better banking, but he's not like most people would expect a typical banker to be. We're a young team and very passionate about what we do.

I made a quick (slightly silly) behind the scenes video with some of our plans for 2019 ( youtube.com/watch?v=q9Evib_bsF0 ) - nice to just see a few faces that work here perhaps.

Now - looking at some of the more general points about the Tandem Savings Accounts that have been made here -
There seem to be a few moments in the on-boarding process, when you sign up for an account, when the process doesn't give you total confidence as a new customer - and that obviously needs fixing, so thanks for highlighting them here.

For example - @Annieddiva - great that your money arrived, but it shouldn't really be a case of experiencing 'relief' when you've just deposited £X in a new savings account. We want you to feel 100% confident all along that journey, not like there's a chance you've deposited into the wrong account or wrong company. So we definitely need to make our communications process better for our customers on this journey. It seems like you received the text message ok, but that a text message wasn't actually quite enough to make you relax about the deposit - and you were expecting an email.

We've just hired 2 more people who are improving the system that sends these messages automatically. The problem in the past has been that there were certain blindspots in the automatic triggering of emails because of the mixture of our own systems and 3rd party systems that we were using. Some of the 3rd party systems involved in the application were only updated once a day for example, and so certain steps of the process could get out of sync or delayed. The new system will make sure that the process is able to be tracked much more accurately 'in one language' from start to finish - so this should solve a lot of the on-boarding uncertainty issues.

One of the reasons that these imperfections happen in the space we are in (digital challenger bank) is that it's a very competitive space and we're constantly under time pressure to get our products out and use them to grow our customer base before the big banks have time to throw money at the situation and copy our new tech and new customer solutions. That means - as people have pointed out - that the early version of the app we released was very simple and frankly, not great. But we've iterated and upgraded it every two weeks this year, as well as launching 6 new banking products (which is pretty a pretty big achievement in a highly regulated and normally pretty slow space). If we hadn't done this, we wouldn't have got the investment or customer growth that have got our products to where they are today. We were expecting to have roughly 150k customers by this stage, but we're closer to 500k, which is great, but has also led to some of the problems you have experienced along the way.

Ultimately, because we are a purpose driven organisation, we believe that by making some of these compromises along the way, we will end up creating more competition in the banking sector and providing better services and value for customers in the end. We hope that you'll stick with us to get there!

If you'd like me to respond to any more questions, feel free to ask here, but I may not see it (not sure if I'll get a notification). If I haven't been back for a while, just come and give me a nudge at facebook.com/tandemmoney with a direct message and I'll come back over to check in. (Or twitter.com/tandemmoney if you prefer)

I've hosted a week long Q&A on a couple of other forums which was a good way to answer a lot of Tandem questions in one space - very happy to do that here for the MSE family if anyone thinks that would be useful.

All the best,

Daniel
TANDEM

PS If you EVER have any problems with bank charges from Tandem, come and message me on facebook. I'm on your side

eskbanker

^ While it's often encouraging to see organisations being proactive with their comms, anyone wanting to post on behalf of a company on here needs to register with the MSE forum team and go through a verification process, as explained at https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/site/forum-faqs/#companies

DanOystar

^ While it's often encouraging to see organisations being proactive with their comms, anyone wanting to post on behalf of a company on here needs to register with the MSE forum team and go through a verification process...

Ok sorry, my bad! Thanks for the link, I'll do that.

deathwishdave

Had a bad experience with Tandem, a case of following policy over common sense.

eskbanker

deathwishdave wrote: »

Had a bad experience with Tandem, a case of following policy over common sense.

If you're wanting your contribution to be useful to people reading the thread and seeking meaningful information, wouldn't it make more sense to give at least an overview of what sort of issue you had and how they responded?

tonycottee

I’ve been using Tandem for the last few months and it’s been quite useful in helping me save a bit extra every month. There's a review of it here.