Charities Aid Foundation Arvostelua 

It is a very expensive bank. Our charity has no regular income and now we are literally spending our last penny on their fixed fees while trying to close our accounts - which has now been going on for 5 months. Not entirely their fault, but part of the problem. It is a mixture of manual, post and hard copy based and electronic banking that they use that makes it slow, expensive and hard to control. I am not sure how they finance themselves. For a small, very amateur-ish organisation like ours, it is no good. Admin hell for volunteers.

Servers unavailable again. Monday and today. I cannot pay £10,000 worth of invoices. This has happened more than once since the upgrade and is incredibly frustrating for small organisations like mine when I am the only one paying bills and I work part-time.

What a shambles, and it really needs a Zero Star. One might forgive them for the monumental screw up with their new website, but months after and things still aren't resolved. It has cost our charity money, and time taken away from the frontline. CAF bank should be ashamed of themselves.

UPDATE
I work for several charities, and I wouldn't feel comfortable with sharing their name. And the thing is there are lots of issues, which you MUST know about (bulk payments, searching for contacts, syncing with xero etc, transfers from caf customers with NO reference) but we the users have no idea of whether these are being fixed. do you have a list? and do you have a date for when they are going to be fixed, given it has now been months since the upgrade. The latest email from CEO Alison Taylor doesn't even mention it!

The system, since the upgrade has been woeful. So clunky and very little has changed to make this 'user friendly'!
A new issue has arisen where suddenly payments have started being released by CAF with only one approval, when the matrix is set for two and has not been changed. The payments are also still sitting in the pending Q!
Apparently we are not the only organisation this is happening too - yet CAF are not being forthcoming about this issue!
This could constitute a fraud risk!

broken links in payment section (including '404 errors) -- there is no way of knowing whether transactions have been completed -- this is unacceptable when dealing with sizeable donations

[details given online at the time -- received confirmation of payment to CAF by email]

I am continually frustrated by the new but unfortunately, not improved, CAF banking system.Today, I am unable to effect some important payments due to the passcode system from CAF not working. I have spent so much time since June 2025 trying to work with the new, very poor, upgraded operating system. Many of the changes that have been made are time consuming and counterintuitive.

I looked them up on the Charity Commission website, where I discovered they have 6 members of staff who each get paid between £200,000 and £400,000 every year!
Where does this come from? Answer: For people who donate to charities, they keep 4.5% for themselves.
So it is more cost-effective to donate to your favourite charities directly.

Very poor service. As a trustee of a small UK charity I used CAF to give money to a Ukrainian charity. CAF sent me a confirmation email giving the wrong donee. CAF were then very difficult to contact. They finally said they couldn’t accept ‘corporate’ donations. They have offered to return our money after a week.

I used to bank with CAFBank, but I decided to close my account due to the ongoing poor service and outdated systems.

The customer service was terrible — most staff seemed to work from home and had little knowledge of how the banking system actually works. It was frustrating to deal with people who couldn’t give clear answers.

The online banking system was confusing, with multiple logins and outdated features. It was difficult to integrate with online payment platforms, and balances were not shown instantly.

Every few months, someone would call asking pages of unnecessary questions, which made things even more frustrating. The website looks old and needs a serious update.

Overall, it’s not a professional or reliable service for charities. I’ve since moved to another bank and had a much better experience.

Terrible Bank. Salaries not paid to staff because " It's payday for a lot of people and they can't process them all fast enough!"
Absolute useless bank. Its medieval.

Following up on my earlier comment right after the tragic system update in June, CAF has only managed to restore the minimum functionality needed to process basic payments. Any effort to improve user experience or system usability have been clearly ditched.

I have provided detailed feedback multiple times by email and over the phone, but none of the issues raised have been addressed. To summarise:

Bulk payments remain extremely difficult to use. Please do not send me the 20-minute tutorial video again, I have watched it several times already. I also previously shared a clear list of specific fixes needed.

The search bar for beneficiaries still does not work, which means I have to scroll through an endless list to find the right one.

The Transfer Activities page continues to display dozens of ‘pending’ transactions that were created during testing of the bulk payment feature. There is no way to remove or clear them, even though I deleted the bulk payment that generated them.

The Requests dashboard still requires expanding each entry individually to view payment details. We need it to show an overview at a glance of all pending payments.

I continue to receive the message “the account name is a match” every time I select a beneficiary, even for recurring ones already on my list.

We have lost hope of a proper update on whether these issues are being reviewed and when we can expect improvements.

update Nov 2025 - still getting spurious texts about non-existent transactions. Staff trained to fob you off with 'it's just delayed' when it clearly isn't. After a battle I extracted a promise to call me back with an updae, although whether they will remains to be seen.

the 'upgrade' was a disaster. It is evident that CAF have bodged enough to get it basically working and then given up. Reports of problems are selectively ignored or they want unpaid volunteers to do all their testing. And apparently it was always a comedy bank where transactions only move 9-5 weekdays. Stuck with them as we have no choice, that's life now.

The new online banking system still has many weaknesses and is difficult to navigate. I have given it the benefit of the doubt for three months but there are to many issues to list.

The change of the online banking system has been an absolute disaster. The system is in no way user friendly. In fact it is completely illogical. I can't wait to transfer our account away from CAF Bank but being a Registered Charity and as CAF are not participants in the current account switching service this is going to take time- sadly. I can't wait to get away from this disaster. Heads should be rolling at the bank.

The recent “upgrade” to CAF Bank’s online banking system has been a disaster. Three months on, the system still doesn’t work. Despite receiving a username and temporary password, I cannot access the service because the OTP never arrives.

Trying to get help is impossible. Calls are met with the same recorded message about “high call volumes” and endless wait times. There is no real support, no resolution, and no accountability.

This has been the worst banking experience I have ever had. We are now looking to move to another provider.

I would give zero stars if possible. We were already looking at moving to a new bank prior to their system 'upgrade' due to very antiquated systems - paper forms etc. Since changes have been made I am still waiting for a May statement, the figures that have been provided are not in date order and can not be reconciled with the end of April and start of June statements. The wait time on the phone is down to half an hour now but they just take your details and a list of the issues and promise a call back which doesn't materialise. We will be changing to a new bank as soon as I have accounts up to date. However I am starting to think that CAF simply do not have and will never have this data. For this chaos to be continuing for months is shockingly bad.

Have truly never seen anything as chaotic and terrible as the roll out of the new online banking system. The platform itself is somehow even worse, even more clunky and antiquated than the previous one. And has been full of bugs and broken parts since in the roll out. Took weeks and weeks for everyone who needed access to get access to the online banking after the roll out. Now a few months down the line and still buggy and difficult to use.

Would genuinely be quite interested to know what's going on inside the organisation as it's hard to understand it's possible to mess up rolling out a new online banking system THIS badly.

We're a tiny organisation so it's a headache to change banks but I'm hoping to do so as soon as we have time!

Very disappointed that I am unable to log in once again. I put in my ID number and password. I have been waiting for a text with OTP and not received anything. I have tried 3 times tonight and am losing patience with this bank.

Have had a terrible experience with all aspects of a large retail bank, our Trust moved to CAF Bank. I have found the opposite when speaking to people at CAF Bank as we opened an online account - polite, very helpful and very effective. I appreciate they have had difficult times, but courteous behaviour is so much better than the lack of response or interest from our previous bank.

CAF Bank is probably the worst banking experience in the UK, from the log-in process that is impossible to use, the long wait times on the helpline and their inability to fix their problems.

As soon as practical, I will be leaving CAF Bank