The Top Easy Access Savings Discussion Area

Band7

My Tandem is now showing 3.05%. I am in the process of transferring my Kroo balance over to Tandem (they are reviewing 💤). Will be sooooo pleased when I see the back of Kroo

jaypers

Is it Kroo who are reviewing? 

cwep2

My experience with Kroo:
Saw heads up on this forum early (23rd Jan) and opened it on the app fairly painlessly. I think traffic started building on 24th and then after it went out on the weekly email became a torrent so others had a worse experience.
Was able to do a £1 bank transfer from my main current account (Santander) at like 11:30pm and it appeared in minutes. Did one back a few minutes later and the £1 was showing in my Santander account a few minutes later. All good so far.

On the 1st Feb with the rates put up and more traffic I transferred larger amounts across. Didn't appear, waited a few hours. There was a notification but when I went to the Kroo app I couldn't find anything. Eventually after some digging (and a small panic) I found the chat function (go to card icon top right of app, then "Need some help") and found they had asked some questions about the deposits. 

"What's the reason for your deposit?" with a button to respond one of the answers, and after that "What's your relationship with the person that sent the payment?" and because it was from me in an account in my name I was hoping for a swift response. 3 hours later I got a response from a bot saying saying "How did your chat go" and the money appeared.
With that successful I transferred another tranche across (late afternoon on 1st), same form, answered straight away, thinking that from same source it should be faster next time - it wasn't.

I was still waiting for the money to appear at 3pm on the 2nd, when they had obviously had time to review the payment and OK it. Finally very late on 2nd it came through, fortunately credited on 1st so I will get interest from when it was deposited.

Totally understandable they have probably  got 10x (or more?) the number of customers suddenly with this offering so the resources (tech and people) are straining at the seams. Hopefully things get better. Overall I'm sympathetic but when you have big amounts of money moving around, confidence that it will get paid and doing so in a timely manner is important, and so I would probably wait for them to grow and be able to cope with customer volumes before recommending them. Since there are now 3-4 other banks offering 3%+ either now or coming in the next two weeks, I'd probably hold off opening an account there.

mebu60

I-LOV-MONEY said:

Wish Santander would hurry up !   It is the hassle of setting up a new account.  Testing it (deposit / withdrawal), transferring the money from one account to the new one.   Having done all that, a new rate will appear!

You could take one for the team and do this :-) 

I fear it will be in vain in this instance. 

But . . . . . . . . 

jaypers

cwep2 said:

My experience with Kroo:
Saw heads up on this forum early (23rd Jan) and opened it on the app fairly painlessly. I think traffic started building on 24th and then after it went out on the weekly email became a torrent so others had a worse experience.
Was able to do a £1 bank transfer from my main current account (Santander) at like 11:30pm and it appeared in minutes. Did one back a few minutes later and the £1 was showing in my Santander account a few minutes later. All good so far.

On the 1st Feb with the rates put up and more traffic I transferred larger amounts across. Didn't appear, waited a few hours. There was a notification but when I went to the Kroo app I couldn't find anything. Eventually after some digging (and a small panic) I found the chat function (go to card icon top right of app, then "Need some help") and found they had asked some questions about the deposits. 

"What's the reason for your deposit?" with a button to respond one of the answers, and after that "What's your relationship with the person that sent the payment?" and because it was from me in an account in my name I was hoping for a swift response. 3 hours later I got a response from a bot saying saying "How did your chat go" and the money appeared.
With that successful I transferred another tranche across (late afternoon on 1st), same form, answered straight away, thinking that from same source it should be faster next time - it wasn't.

I was still waiting for the money to appear at 3pm on the 2nd, when they had obviously had time to review the payment and OK it. Finally very late on 2nd it came through, fortunately credited on 1st so I will get interest from when it was deposited.

Totally understandable they have probably  got 10x (or more?) the number of customers suddenly with this offering so the resources (tech and people) are straining at the seams. Hopefully things get better. Overall I'm sympathetic but when you have big amounts of money moving around, confidence that it will get paid and doing so in a timely manner is important, and so I would probably wait for them to grow and be able to cope with customer volumes before recommending them. Since there are now 3-4 other banks offering 3%+ either now or coming in the next two weeks, I'd probably hold off opening an account there.

I get the impression that they are pretty low tech and basic. As well as not seem to be able to cope with high demand (lack of capacity perhaps), the pressure of trying to make sure they adhere to all of the required sanctions and fraud controls/checks must be a lot of extra work for them. Suspect their systems will not in any way be a match for the big institutions where a lot of this is well rehearsed and automated. Just surmising here but having worked in IT for a large Bank for a very long time I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the case. Even Chase, who are a very large US Bank, struggled early on in the UK with demand. 

For all of these reasons I have avoided them.

Band7

Band7 said:

My Tandem is now showing 3.05%. I am in the process of transferring my Kroo balance over to Tandem (they are reviewing 💤). Will be sooooo pleased when I see the back of Kroo

Yes, sorry, I meant Kroo are reviewing. To be fair, they did it relatively quickly and released the payments within the hour. After the payments were released, Kroo also emailed me this morning to say they were reviewing my incoming payments and would cancel them if they didn’t hear from me within 72 hours. No idea what this is about 🤪

I am now waiting for Kroo to act on my request to close my account. Their overzealous review practice doesn‘t suit my requirements - I need instant transfers between my current and instant access savings account.

They also have yet to answer a question I asked on their Chat over 24 hours ago. The question isn‘t answered in their FAQ, either. All I wanted to know is how I can delete a payee. It seems you can‘t.

Band7

After ending my stay at Kroo, I am now trying my luck with Tandem. I have had this account for a long time but never had more than £1k in there until today, when I deposited a lowish 5-figure amount from a previously verified current account, using OB. The transaction completed fine but they said it could take up to 2 hours to show in my account. A few minutes later, they sent a msg to confirm the money had been added to my account. This suggests they also do some checks on incoming payments, similar to Kroo. I reserve judgment for now on what I think about this 🤔

SanguineOnSaturn

Re deleting a contact.

In the app click on Kroo at bottom, then there is a see all next to 'people'. Click on any of the contacts (people / payees) and there is a delete contact at the bottom of my screen, small font and in red.

AmityNeon

Band7 said:

After ending my stay at Kroo, I am now trying my luck with Tandem. I have had this account for a long time but never had more than £1k in there until today, when I deposited a lowish 5-figure amount from a previously verified current account, using OB. The transaction completed fine but they said it could take up to 2 hours to show in my account. A few minutes later, they sent a msg to confirm the money had been added to my account. This suggests they also do some checks on incoming payments, similar to Kroo. I reserve judgment for now on what I think about this 🤔

In my experience, Tandem is similar to Zopa. Nothing is ever instant (there's usually a delay of ~15 minutes), but they only allow deposits from and withdrawals to verified/linked accounts, so it's nothing like Kroo's random spot checks of incoming payments.

SeriousHoax

Band7 said:

After ending my stay at  Kroo, I am now trying my luck with Tandem. I have had this account for a long time but never had more than £1k in there until today, when I deposited a lowish 5-figure amount from a previously verified current account, using OB. The transaction completed fine but they said it could take up to 2 hours to show in my account. A few minutes later, they sent a msg to confirm the money had been added to my account. This suggests they also do some checks on incoming payments, similar to Kroo. I reserve judgment for now on what I think about this 🤔

I Just transferred 25k into my tandem account and it went In within 5.mins.

( I'll be doing a few 25k over the next couple days)