CAF Bank Reviews 

I just wanted to delete a transaction I incorrectly set up and struggled to find where - more than one year after they changed their online banking interface I'm still not finding it intuitive. Nothing is where you'd expect it to be, it's time consuming, clunky and cumbersome.

In 2025 they changed from a very intuitive, easy to use online banking system to this terrible layout. Their argument was that it was for security - fair enough. The transfer went horribly wrong with online banking down or limited for extended periods. No help over the phone. You ring them and they just say "Sorry, there are too many people, try call again later".

To add insult to injury, one year later their online banking goes down because of a security breach. In other words, the transfer to the "more secure" online banking was apparently didn't prevent a security breach but just caused everyone a massive headache.

In fairness, it was good that they closed the online banking immediately to avoid anyone getting defrauded. Good. It remained down for about 10 days in our case. Communication just stated that it was down "until further notice". No backup plans (if existent) being communicated, it was virtually impossible to get through to them on the phone. If you were lucky enough to get into the queue, waiting times were hours - until you got cut off randomly.

We appreciate that this bank was set up to serve charities. In the last 15 months, that service was rather appalling.

This organisation is totally out of its depth in the banking sector.

An online banking ‘upgrade’ in 2025 was a complete and embarrassing debacle resulting in its customers being unable to transact or access its funds. After what seemed to be weeks of trying to put right its botched banking system, attempts were made to engage customers with consultations and live online events to ‘understand’ what customers wanted and what their priorities were. This was at least positive.

Roll forward to July 2026 and another debacle! Some form of unauthorised attack on their banking system has resulted in the online banking being taken down on 24 July. Again no access to accounts, precious little information and customers unable to make online payments without contacting CAF Bank.

Of course this tiny organisation were overwhelmed. I phoned them and found I was number 115 in the queue at 2pm. I gave up at 5.40 pm ( yes nearly 4 hours hold) having moved to only 35 in the queue. Completely hopeless state of affairs.

Our charity, thankfully, has opened a charity account at one of the major banks. A seamless exercise. However, CAF bank are not even a member of the Bank switcher service so changing banks will be a manual exercise but well worth the effort to extract yourself from CAF. At every opportunity when we have found CAF to be available in the last few days we have removed funds to a new bank.

CAF Bank - you have had your chances but no more. One of the most shocking examples of poor service I have ever experienced.

Nothing but issues. We've been unable to access our online banking for approximately two weeks due to security concerns. We then received an email to say that online banking was now accessible via a one time passcode sent via text. Tried to log in and was denied access multiple times - despite using the correct log in details. No one time password was sent.
Tried calling them to be told that I am 15th in the queue, I've currently been on hold for twenty minutes and there are still 12 people in front of me. How are we supposed to run our charities with this level of service?

After a weekend without the system following 10 days of downtime; Today; no confirmation text received for a payment raised and a duplicated text for second logon, hence not able to logon now. I've now been denied access due to failed attempts at logging in caused entirely by their system.
Two hours latter I received the text for the payment authorisation and the second attempt at logon. This after I had closed my computer
I now find that having been denied access and on ringing their help line I have to fill out a form and wait for them to contact me so that i can get access again. Frustration multiplies.... This bank is an utter shambles !

2nd time disaster has hit them
- leaving customers in the dark about payments in or out and no means of making payments. With long overdue apologies, no information - just an offer of 2 months free banking, ie £10. Recompense for DAYS of staff and volunteer time wasted trying to contact them. Words fail. The writing is on the wall for this bank - which is utterly failing its customers and the charity sector.

Appalling bank that has had two major online banking outages in 12 months which left us, as customers, unable to pay bills, payroll or even check if payments to us had been received. Not just a day of zero access but weeks! Telephone calls get met with message saying 'we are too busy, try again in a few day'. Switching banks now.

There were significant problems for months when a new website was implemented in the summer of 2025, but I didn't give a bad review then. I am writing this in August 2026, 11 days after online banking was taken down due to security concerns, with no indication of when it will be back up again. I can't pay anyone, I don't know who has paid us, I thank my lucky stars that I set up payroll well in advance, but now I have freelancer invoices due. The compensation we are offered: they are going to waive two months' charges: £10 in total. Less than one person hour on minimum wage.

Clearly a bank without any contingency for when things go wrong.

After a terrible experience last year where their new website was opened we now have an ongoing outage that means we have had no access for around ten days.

It is currently impossible to access transaction details - imperative when reporting monthly accounts to trustees, and reporting to funders about projects.

They also seem unable to deal with the number of calls they are getting with charities having to wait many hours to get through, and often being cut off.

In order to pay anything we have to go though the call centre, then wait for a call for the potential transaction to be authorised.

It is also likely that charities are unable to receive new donations as other banks are unable to confirm the bank account details.

Having said all that, the worst thing is that they are giving their customers no real information about how long this will last. I very much doubt in twelve months time (sooner maybe) that they will still have 14,000 customers.

Yet another problem with CAFbank - the only good thing about them is that they understand charities - but not well enough to understand banking! After their dreadful "upgrade"last year that made their service much worse now we are all locked out of our accounts for more than a week. What is a small charity meant to do when we can't access our money, or even check our balances? I wouldn't recommend CAF bank to anyone at all - but I can't move banks whilst my account is locked down and fully under their control not ours.

★☆☆☆☆

I have always regarded CAF Bank as a bank that understood the needs of charities. Unfortunately, the handling of its current extended online banking outage has seriously damaged that confidence.

I fully accept that when a potential security vulnerability is discovered, customer protection must come first. Suspending online banking may well have been the right decision. However, what has followed has highlighted a worrying lack of resilience, contingency planning and communication.

CAF Bank has repeatedly explained that the problem stems from a previously unknown vulnerability in third-party software. While that may explain why the incident began, it does not explain why customers have been left without online banking for so long. Customers chose CAF Bank, not its software suppliers. Managing technology risk is part of the bank’s responsibility.

The biggest frustration has been the lack of meaningful information. We are told people are working around the clock and that regulators have been informed, but there is still no realistic indication of when service will return or what remains to be done. Instead, customers receive apologies without the transparency needed to plan.

For charities, churches and voluntary organisations, online banking is not a luxury. Payroll, supplier payments, grants and essential services all depend on it. The replacement process—long telephone queues, manual payment instructions and verification calls—is simply not an adequate substitute for a modern banking service.

CAF Bank says our money is safe, and I have no reason to doubt that. But access to money is just as important as its security. A bank must be able to provide both.

Cyber incidents can happen to any organisation, and I would not criticise CAF Bank simply because it experienced one. What disappoints me is the apparent lack of operational resilience and the absence of clear, honest communication throughout the crisis.

I sincerely hope CAF Bank learns from this experience and rebuilds the trust it has lost. At present, however, I cannot recommend it.

CAF Bank are appalling. If I could I would give 0 stars. 7 days & counting with no access to statements & payment. We no longer have a cheque book or paper statements. They have made the savings now we are paying the price. Will be writing to the Banking Ombudsman and looking to change bank when we can get access to our money.

How can a company have 100% 1 star reviews yet get 2.3 stars as an overall rating? Is trustpilot rating a fiddle?

CAF have had a disastrous 13 months with systemic wekness and lack of preparedness. Very poor.

CAf have brought over 14000 charities to a halt. They have taken down their online banking due to an alleged security issue, but are clearly unable to fix it. The offered alternative of telephone banking involves 8 hours on hold and still a high chance of bring cut off, as they do not have anywhere near enough staff. CEO issues infrequent fob off updates but the system is still down after a week. Charity staff are not being paid as payroll cannot run.

They never did more than bodge the problems following last years disaster, and ignore all feedback. There are very few alternatives for charity banking so they cannot be closed down, but urgent action is needed to move the operation somewhere competent.

For a company who "are dedicated to meeting the banking needs of charities and social enterprises — from micro charities to the UK’s best-known charitable and social purpose organisations" they don't appear to be doing this very well. Their on-line banking system has been down continuously for,4 days with no update or communication to users for the last two days.

They state that they've"understand the pressures our customers and others across the charitable sector face because we are wholly owned by a charity," but clearly don't as they don't seem to want to put in place processes that will help us.

They say they have 14,000 charities that bank with them. I suspect there will be considerable less charities who bank with them after this and I would advise anyone considering them to stay away. There are far better alternatives available.

And better use of their time would be in answering telephone calls so people are not waiting 6 hours for a response, rather than responding to valued criticism now. Sort the problem out NOW and respond to your customers rather than trying a useless damage limitation exercise. Perhaps you could also change our main point of contact which I've been asking you to do for 4 weeks now instead of responding to criticism.

Not really sure how CAF Bank gets as much as two point something as all the reviews are one star! There has been no online banking since Friday, and there is no information about the end of this. I check our bank accounts at least once a day, often more, so I can't complete some of our business processes. Plus, I need to transfer monies into a supplier payments account by next week with no guarantees it will happen.
This comes a year after the worst upgrade in the history of online banking. It's better than it was but it is still far from perfect. You can't search by certain types of payment, bulk payments are clunky and it's just very hard to use. They are working on it but they're not moving far enough.

What's worse is you can't speak to a real person. I've tried 3 times and every time they say they are not taking any more calls that day! Everyone who gets that message is left unhelped and dissatisfied but CAF Bank do not give a stuff.

If you have a charity and are looking for a bank service, use someone else. You will save yourself HOURS of frustration.

Whoever is running this joke of a bank should have the decency to resign immediately!!!

What a shambles! Over 6 days now without any internet access to our accounts. We are in the dark as to how we are doing financially - unable to process payments or even do our monthly bank reconciliations.
The new on-line platform has been nothing short of a disaster since day one.
Making bulk payments is the most cumbersome activity of my month, with there being at least 5 steps to getting a payment set up before it can be authorised. To cap it all this month the person who authorises the payments can no longer see the detail to be able to verify the accuracy of the bulk payments and so we will need to go back to setting up all payments individually.
We would never recommend CAF to another charity, but probably like many are trapped becauyse we have so many donors that pay directly into our main account.

The incompetence of this bank is quite staggering. Over a year and a half to get their bulk payment system barely functioning, and now down for days because of a security breach. Any charities out there, and particularly volunteers, please do not waste your time with this bank - you'll spend a staggering amount of time trying to use their awful online banking, and suffer outages like this no doubt in the future. I'd strongly recommend you look at HSBC or one of the main hughstreet banks who offer free/low cost charity accounts and benefit from proper infrastructure and competence.

Unable to access online banking
Unable to operate any payments due to banking platform collapse offline for days on end with no communications or notice when it will be up and running.

Total operational chaos!
Recent, so-called "upgrades" and ongoing online banking blackouts have locked charities and organisations out from accessing their money, bringing admin to a complete standstill.

As a charity ourselves, we've been completely unable to check incoming payments and have been forced into making late payments to beneficiaries.
With no access to the website we were directed to calling CAF on the phone for assistance, however the telephone helplines are entirely overwhelmed! I was left trapped on hold for hours with no answer.
To top it all off, their automated text message system is a complete shambles, with administrators, trustees and volunteers being woken up by glitchy automated text alerts in the middle of the night (like 3:40 AM!) warning of "new beneficiaries" that were actually created weeks ago!! This bank shows complete contempt for the thousands of non-profits and Charities relying on them.

Unprofessional, unreliable, and an absolute threat to people's payrolls, payments and community services in general.