Plum - App Issues

hugheskevi

I just opened a Plum cash ISA, and it is so painful to use. Plum tries to be new, different, and accessible to all, but ends up complicating what should be the simplest of processes.

My issues were:

(1) You have to connect a current account when you sign up, so I connected my main current account. Plum will then not accept funds from any other account, which was an issue as I use a different current account with larger transfer limits for things like cash ISA subscriptions. This meant payments from the other account got bounced back by Plum. To resolve this you have to change the linked current account, and how to do this is far from intuitive, although the AI help gave good information.

(2) Plum will only accept full transfers of ISAs from other providers. If you have a flexible ISA with the other provider, any allowance of replacable funds will be lost on transfer. As Plum will not accept partial transfers there is no way around this.

(3) My wife and I have joint current accounts. After I set up and funded my Plum ISA I then did the same for my wife. However, as my Plum account was connected to our joint current account it would not allow my wife's Plum account to connect to the joint current account. To resolve this I expect I will need to change the linked current account on my Plum account to another current account, and then it should allow my wife to connect to the joint current account I want to take the funds from.

(4) Spam. So many bits of useless information. I do not care about Plum pockets, automations, and subscriptions. I only want to put money in my cash ISA.

My experience was that it felt needlessly bloated and obstructive. I just want a cash ISA account I can send money to, it is by far the biggest phaff to use of any provider I have used in the last 20 years.

eskbanker

Not sure all of that criticism is fair - they do publish the fact that they don't accept partial transfers, so you can establish that before choosing to open an ISA with them if it's important to you:

We only accept full Cash ISA transfers.

https://help.withplum.com/en/articles/8999209-transfer-cash-isa-into-plum

and linking the wrong current account does seem to be more of a 'you' issue than a Plum one, although not allowing two holders to link the same joint account isn't impressive…

hugheskevi

Not sure all of that criticism is fair - they do publish the fact that they don't accept partial transfers, so you can establish that before choosing to open an ISA with them if it's important to you:

I agree, not all providers allow partial transfers so this is a quite minor thing.

I opened the account to deposit £20K for 26/27, and if they had either offered partial transfers or transfer of flexible balance I would have transferred my existing ISA to them too (I am fairly sure that is permitted under transfer rules, but could be wrong).

It was just another frustration that they don't offer either of two things that they could offer and which would be useful but have chosen not to, whereas recent partial transfers between II and Trading212 were fast and straightforward.

and linking the wrong current account does seem to be more of a 'you' issue than a Plum one,

When going through the deposit options, it wasn't clear in the interface that manual transfers from a non-linked account would be rejected, and that the manual transfer details are provided only in case you do not wish to use their easy transfer system for some reason. That is not a required restriction, it is another provider choice that caused frustration, and wasn't noted at the point of use in the app.

Nothing individually is shocking, just in totality, I find it frustrating at every turn when all I want to do is open an account and send money to it.

Even designing it so that money arrives into a "Primary Pocket" and then has to be moved was another minor irritant, compounded by that move not being instant and taking up to 1 business day (it was much quicker in practice, but not instant). All minor things in isolation, but when all taken together, I found the user experience to be awful for me personally.

masonic

These "smart" savings accounts are tailored to people who find it difficult to save and/or like to divide their money into pots. Zopa smart saver is similar. People like us who have no interest in such things have to work around these foibles to access an underlying product, and it is either worth it or not depending on your disposition.

For me, Plum remains a useful source of direct debits for bank switching incentives. After using them exclusively for that purpose for a few years, I held an ISA with them for a year, which was surprisingly painless, but have now moved on.