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

niarobyn

I've just followed up wit ha mail below to D Henry (COO), copied to the CEO, Board Chairperson, and NED:

Despite your lack of desire to properly admit that you have been the author of one of the most unbelievable acts of client impacting ineptitude in the technological history of retail banking, I wanted also to copy in some of the people who seem to be standing by and assuming / hoping that this absolute nightmare that you have inflicted is in some way OK and worthy of your dismissal of us all, and of the consequences. IT IS NOT OK! 

(Hello Kees, from a previous part of my career, by the way).

What is also not OK is:

• Your team arrogantly pushing away the feedback that those of us who have worked in the sector and / or are your clients provided a long time before this all started. See the below on the Money Saving Forum, in reply to my first post. 
• I too was told that I was the only one to mention all of this. It is NOT OK to be told lies
• It is also NOT OK for you to remove service features that we have all relied on, and not tell us until after the botched migration. You have deliberately misled us, since you must have known that you were about to diminish your proposition. 
• Your flippant emails trying to minimise the problems that you have caused and are causing. It is NOT OK to under-communicate 
• Your disdain for your clients by now saying (email below) that you feel it is OK for you to stop updating weekly. How can you be so arrogant as to not keep on communicating at least weekly, when your clients are trying to find a way through the mess you have created. It is NOT OK
• Your belief that it is only customers who need to suffer the painful consequences of all of this. How you can justify any of this, let alone dismiss it all as if you haven’t made lasting reductions to the service and the features we have, is NOT OK.

General_Grant

What gets me, given that what we have now was supposed to be an upgrade, is the latest general update email includes, "I can assure you that we plan to continuously improve the service over the coming weeks and months".  Is that plan a threat?

Wetherby_Pond

General_Grant said:

What gets me, given that what we have now was supposed to be an upgrade, is the latest general update email includes, "I can assure you that we plan to continuously improve the service over the coming weeks and months".

The quote is actually "I can assure you that we plan to continuously improve the service over the coming weeks and months so that it’s more straightforward to use."   

Once again that shows that CAF mistakenly see the widespread criticism as a failure by customers to understand how to use the new system.  CAF is in denial that the new design has serious banking flaws and is not fit for purpose, even if it was running as designed.   Their fudge of 'coming months' shows they are not committed to improvements - and I doubt they have a technical solution for many of the badly designed "features" .

IrateCAFBankUser

I have emailed Alison Taylor (CEO), Dina Henry (COO) and Sachi Caldera (Interim Head of Business Operations). If anyone else wants to email the top directly, the format of email address is Initial+Surname @cafonline.org, e.g. JSmith@cafonline.org. In mid June, this produced a speedy result on a Friday evening.

Amongst other things, I have pointed out that it is unhelpful to point us to a user guide that does not match the system! When I phoned a poor support person on Friday about the inability to look at transactions by type, he had a conversation with someone else and eventually told me that "that functionality is currently disabled".

We are a small charity with turnover under £50K and no staff - I commiserate with those of you trying to do more complex things!

I am also a director of a tiny CIC (turnover under £15K) which is also with CAFBank. Another major irritation is that I can no longer have two log-ins, one for each organisation, which means that I have to choose which organisation I am working in every time I move to a new screen.   

andyt8

IrateCAFBankUser said:

I am also a director of a tiny CIC (turnover under £15K) which is also with CAFBank. Another major irritation is that I can no longer have two log-ins, one for each organisation, which means that I have to choose which organisation I am working in every time I move to a new screen.   

Wow that is yet another DOWNGRADE in service and a real pain to have to do that each screen move.  Don't CAF realise that people, especially volunteers, often work with more than one organisation and their approach to base their new banking system on a PERSONAL rather the ORGANISATIONAL basis is infuriating. I for one would want to keep the working with each organisation quite distinct.

IrateCAFBankUser

@andyt8, I agree. Strangely enough, I am quite organised and would tend to do the work for one organisation at a difference time from the work for the other.
I'd change one (or both) of the banking arrangements but it is such a major pain. The larger one gets most of its income from SOs directly from supporters and it is very risky asking them to move them! 

IrateCAFBankUser

To be more positive, I received a phonecall from CAF Bank on Monday afternoon. The man on the other end talked to me for 40 minutes about my complaints and said that he would pass them on. I suggested that it would be a good idea for them to have a publicly visible change summary and a list of functionality that is being worked on. A public problem-logging system would be even better and reduce the amount of time people spend trying to phone them.