Charities Aid Foundation Reviews 151

PLEASE, please sort out the beneficiary search function. It doesn't work most of the time, and then you have to scroll manually through a list of hundreds of beneficiaries which aren't listed in alphabetical order, with no way to sort them. And then when you do eventually find a beneficiary to update their bank details, you discover you can't. So you have to go through the whole search palaver again to delete them and add a new beneficiary. The system is so clunky and frustrating, even so many months after the "upgrade". I dread doing the weekly payments.

Diabolical. The new portal was a disgrace. Customer service non existent. Have requested a bulk payment was deleted for almost a year and the bank unable to do so despite constant promises that it was being resolved. As a result almost 30 THOUSAND POUNDS left our charity account without authorisation. Your funding is not safe and they should not be regulated. The response, to contact everyone who received payment and ask for it back. Incompetent, dangerous banking. Do not consider opening an account with them unless you are happy to have no control over your own banking and are happy to use funding to pay staff to constantly contact CAFBANK rather than make a difference to the community.

I went to put money on my CAF account. At which point I discovered that they had suspended the account because I had not used it recently. Fair enough. But, I asked, would it not be more sensible to send an email to the customer telling them that their account is about to be disabled, rather than waiting for them to try and transact and hit a problem. Apparently that would be too difficult or too much work - so the computer can be programmed to suspend my account but not to send out an email! I don't think I will be adding any money to my account

Truly abysmal customer service. I can only guess that there is only 1 person staffing the line at any one point. I was number 1 in a queue for over 30 minutes. I have waited for a call back before but always took ages. Theoretically, CAF is a great idea. Practically - dreadful. And that is before we even get onto the disaster that was the tech update.

It is hard to think of anything about CAF that isn't a disaster. The online portal makes online banking so much harder than it needs to be. The recent upgrade was anything but. There are only about two people in the customer service team who seem to have any idea what's going on. I struggle to understand how they are still in business. I would strongly advise anyone thinking about opening an account with CAF to think again. Banking with CAF is probably the worst decision our charity ever made. Trying to extract yourself from one bank in order to move to another is more complicated than you think (and I expect CAF trade on this sadly). But, move we will and I can't wait to bank with a company which has systems that are fit for purpose and staff who are properly trained.

Trying to set up new account. Was sent full details of how to login for the first time. Didn't work. And of course help desk goes home at 5pm will try to call tomorrow but seeing the reviews here I don't hold out much help. Ombudsman next call.

Now expecting the standard cut and past answer from CAF.

Would give zero stars if possible:

-Like lots in the charity sector we suffered through their “upgrade” - couldn’t pay staff or suppliers for several days, non-existent customer service, all signatories locked out of internet banking.
-Were promised proper compensation by staff who subsequently vanished and we never got it.
-Complaints were simply ignored.
-Eventually managed to get into online banking, only to find notification of payments that had been set up were so delayed that the payments were cancelled.
-Unable to set up new signatories despite providing all required information, and three calls with customer service were unable to resolve.
-Three emails to our account manager went unanswered so the question of new signatories remains unresolved.

I used to be a fan of CAF Bank, but their new online platform brings absolutely no benefits, causes tangible problems for customers, and is an example of exactly how not to manage such a transition. I will never use them again.

The laughably touted banking portal 'upgrade' happened in early June 2025 and still today, almost 10 months later, the serious flaws in this totally inadequate system have not been fixed. Basic, fundamental, flaws still remain: only 30 transactions visible, search function is useless, bulk payments keep crashing. Come one guys - sort this mess out please.

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.