Charities CAF Bank in meltdown since their new system went live Monday 9th June

andyt8

It is now three (3) working weeks since the UK Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) replaced their old banking system with a brand new one.  STILL it is not working properly and there must be hundreds of accounts and thousands of people who can not get access to their accounts due to login, OTP and errors in the system once you do occasionally manage to login.

CAF bank just switched off the old system on Friday evening and Switched on the new one on the Monday.  With apparently NO FALLBACK option.   They can't even answer their phone help line - if you are lucky you will be in a queue of 30 or more people which takes easily one (1) hour for you to get to the front of.   

CAF bank give the helpful advice to go online to try and find a solution to your problem but you can't even login in many cases.

They have no call back system on their understaffed help line so unless you have the time to hang on to the phone line for over an hour it is not worth you waiting to recorded messages repeated over and over and over again 

Who can we complain to - CAF know about their problems and have had three weeks to sort it without success.   The Financial Ombudsman service say you have to give the organisation a chance (8 weeks ) to sort problems before they can look into it

Frustrated Charity Worker who has their bank accounts locked away with CAF.  I am surprised this bank meltdown that is seriously effecting the UK charity sector has not yet featured in the mainstream news.  Charities are having trouble paying their workers, beneficiaries etc.. Just go to the CAF Facebook page to see the widespread problems. 

x44

It does seem to have gone "all TSB like" from the emails from them that I have got.

I'm one of the lucky ones in that I and a couple of others run a small charity so we ensured all payments were made in advance of the "upgrade", downloaded all statements etc -  as we sadly fully expected some level of chaos, and as we are all volunteers we have no payroll to deal with and we are not making bulk payments.

I logged on the first Monday morning and it seemed to be working OK and my colleagues likewise did the same later on and found no problems with logging on and viewing screens and our permissions of the primary user(me) and the secondary authorisers

I have not needed to to make any payments yet - and I've not dared to logon since then!

DullGreyGuy

andyt8 said:

Who can we complain to - CAF know about their problems and have had three weeks to sort it without success.   The Financial Ombudsman service say you have to give the organisation a chance (8 weeks ) to sort problems before they can look into it

The financial services company have up to 8 weeks to respond to your complaint from the date of registration, if they haven't provided a final response to you by then you are entitled to take the mater to the FOS. In most cases the final response is much earlier than 8weeks and you can go to FOS as soon as you have the final response. 

Once you've complained to the FOS you are typically then in a 2-3 month queue for an investigator/adjudicator to be appointed and have them look into the case. It's not a quick process. 

DullGreyGuy

andyt8 said:

Who can we complain to - CAF know about their problems and have had three weeks to sort it without success.   The Financial Ombudsman service say you have to give the organisation a chance (8 weeks ) to sort problems before they can look into it

The financial services company have up to 8 weeks to respond to your complaint from the date of registration, if they haven't provided a final response to you by then you are entitled to take the mater to the FOS. In most cases the final response is much earlier than 8weeks and you can go to FOS as soon as you have the final response. 

Once you've complained to the FOS you are typically then in a 2-3 month queue for an investigator/adjudicator to be appointed and have them look into the case. It's not a quick process. 

Cherryred2009

God only knows what this is costing the charity sector. I work for two charities, and CAF says it can’t text codes to my phone for both, though in one case a text arrives about half an hour later. They have obviously changed the phone system, so at any time that isn’t 9am on the dot I get a message telling me to try again. I managed payroll for one, but I am now late with paying the workers’ June invoices. If any other bank had implemented a new system so ineptly it would be making headlines. I rang at 9.01, I started off 15th in the queue. I’ve been on hold for 45 minutes and I’m in queue position 6. 

Jay14

If you have never dealt with CAFBank, my advice is don't.
Treasurer for a small charitable organisation, we have used CAFBank for a while. When I took over as Treasurer earlier in 2025 I found it very clunky, not user-friendly. Since the bank re-set its online banking with effect from June 9th the situation is beyond being an unbelievable shambles.
I made numerous attempts to ring in to the helpline, sometimes couldn't even get on the queue as it was so overloaded. When I did get into the queue, with estimated 2 hour queue, after hanging on for over an hour I was then cut off. Hours and hours wasted waiting for an adviser. When I eventually I got through to one they couldn't help and said they'd escalate the problem to the Bank??? I'd dialled the Bank's tel number so who was I talking to?

Tried emailing their email support line and in over 10-12 days had no reply.
Eventually after 4 weeks I did manage to wait for another 90 min, get through to an adviser and after 5 attempts taking more than another hour this person got me online. However, by next day I couldn't get online again as the username I was using had been suspended/deleted by the Bank, and new credentials sent which took another 3 or 4 attempts before they would work.

It is ridiculous that all this time the CAFBank tel helpline has only been open from 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday. When you are in full-time work yourself (which is not connected with your organisation that uses CAFBank, how are you supposed to tell your employer you need to spend hours to wait on a tel helpline for something not all to do with your work? No tel CAFBank helpline service outside 9-5 Mon-Fri throughout the last 4 weeks.

I now have access to the accounts but my 2nd authoriser was never sent new credentials. When she asked for some, the credentials she was sent didn’t work, so she is waiting for new ones to be sent.  We still cannot use our funds to carry out any external transactions, only move money between our accounts with CAFBank. We can’t even remove all accounts and money from them.

When I get online is the online banking experience better than before? In my opinion, No. 

x44

Chance are that you second authoriser did receive the credentials but they went into spam.

My new username email went into spam box

My temporary password sent by text likewise went into text spam.

...but then a previous email telling up when we would be receiving the new details was noted and I went looking for the stuff in my spam boxes when nowt appeared.

General_Grant

Jay14 said:

. . . 

 When I eventually I got through to one they couldn't help and said they'd escalate the problem to the Bank??? I'd dialled the Bank's tel number so who was I talking to?

. . .

Reading today's email from them regarding the service, the answer seems to be that you get through to CAF and then there could be re-routing.  They say, "Customers who call us will speak to either a member of CAF or CAF Bank Customer Services, depending on their query." (my emphasis)

Wetherby_Pond

CAF have handled this migration very badly. Technically the new system was not ready, appears not to have been tested at all, and has some very basic errors that persist.  Statements can not handle dates, and clearly dates are in the wrong format and the resultant balances shown are incorrect - this is fundamental banking mistakes - it should not have been released and goodness knows how anyone at CAF did not spot it.  I think CAF are too small to be able to manage such a migration and their sub-contractors are not up to the job of building a basic bespoke banking infrastructure. Likewise their choice of partner of the text access system (and the lamentable HID app authenticator was a mistake.

From a communications point of view it has been handled woefully.  No one anticipated the need for telephone help on a wide scale - because they didn't know how bad their software was. They were slow to get sub-contractors to cope with call handling.   CAF have consistently blamed their customers for not understanding the complex new processes - hence the FAQ videos and handy advice like 'make sure you have money in your account before making a payment' (from COO Dina Henry).  Yet they never acknowledge the long list of flaws and bugs nor give a timescale for remedy. This is not how you should handle comms in a crisis.

Customers deserve much better. If this was a bigger bank then heads would roll.

niarobyn

Hello. We have now given up on CAF ever being even what it was - ie flawed but OK - (I even warned them pre their banking tech migration that it seemed that they were ill-prepared, and that was just based on their pre launch emails). We have several different current accounts and a single Gold savings account that sweeps (well, it did do before that feature was removed as part of the so-called upgrade). 

Does anyone have any recommendations on the best equivalent bank and account to move to please?

Thanks! 

Wetherby_Pond

niarobyn said:

Hello. We have now given up on CAF ever being even what it was - ie flawed but OK - (I even warned them pre their banking tech migration that it seemed that they were ill-prepared, and that was just based on their pre launch emails). 

Yes, I too complained to CAF in May that their pre-launch communications were very poor and predicted they were going to have a challenging migration.   They fobbed me off and said I was the only one.  7 weeks later and clearly their internal comms is as bad as their external comms!

I too would be interested to know if there are any reliable alternatives to CAF - dual signatories, no cheques, no cash, reliable online banking.