Zopa banking problems

DrPaul

Been using Zopa (amongst many others, thanks Martin!) mainly because of their savings rates and was on the point of moving my main banking to them - moving to a new phone has broken notifications on my Chase app which is proving a real pain.

Currently my pension arrives at Chase, I immediately move it to the Zopa savings account and then feed back the amounts required for upcoming payments from Chase.

My pension arrived last night (well 1am this morning, I was watching the NFL) so I sent most of it to Zopa, then used the Zopa app to move the money into the savings account. Minutes later I realised that my energy bill was due the next day so I went back to the Zopa app to move money from savings to current and thence to Chase.

Hit the button to do the internal transfer and just got an error message along the lines of "payment failed due to a technical issue at our end, please try again" - REALLY?! So I did try again, many times, same failure. To make it worse, after a couple of tries I was sure that the amount involved was now missing from either account. Complete panic - there goes my credit rating if that bill isn't paid tomorrow.

That's when I discovered that, unlike Chase, Zopa only offer technical support during office hours. A sleepless night racked with worry was only avoided by the thought that I could pull some funds from my ISA if needed to cover the shortfall.

Woke this morning to find that the funds had now magically appeared in my Zopa current account, so thought that I ought to try and find out what was going on. Don't think I mentioned that this was about the third time something similar has happened over the previous months.

So it's into chat we go (I would so much prefer an email exchange at my convenience) to be told that the failure was because the app was "under construction" at that point and everything was now fine. Well, not fine at all as far as I'm concerned. If that is the case, announce an outage, lock your systems down and then do the upgrade. Suddenly finding that you can't access any of your money and that there is no technical support available is a very unpleasant feeling.

I will be moving my funds out of Zopa as a matter of urgency.

Ayr_Rage

If you throw your toys out of the Zopa pram you are just as likely to find another bank that does its maintenance in the wee small hours and replicates the unusual issue you've just had.

flaneurs_lobster

If you are doing your banking at 2am then it's not surprising that

a) things are undergoing the usual overnight processes and payments are often held until later

b) tech/customer support is not available.

Chase are unusual in claiming 24/7 support, might find that hard to find elsewhere.

DrPaul

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82143869#Comment_82143869

My issue is that it just threw an error. Never seen an actual failure like that with any other banking, and I've had accounts with pretty much all of them.

flaneurs_lobster

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82144125#Comment_82144125

Systems throw errors all the time. When the error is reported what the customer sees is often very different to what is reported on internal system logs - often the customer will see nothing at all, a simple internal retry will sort the issue.

Just seems Zopa have been rather loose with their programming, instead of you seeing a nice calm "We seem to be having some issues - please try later" you've got something a bit more alarming.

Amazed that a user of many bank's online systems hasn't seen an error message a lot more full-on "it's totally FUBARed" than your rather mild example.

dcs34

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82144356#Comment_82144356

Does logging in to see other people's account information count as a 'mild, calm error message', or 'something a bit more alarming'? 😉

Note this has happened to customers of TSB, Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland amongst others…but they're still in business.

Doing your banking at 2am is likely to throw up edge cases as this is when most banks process most of their daily actions. If you end up missing the payment and getting a charge/penalty etc then make a formal complaint to Zopa/FOS.

ZeroSum

Dont go to virgin then, as theyre down most of the time after midnight.