CAF Bank Reviews 

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.

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.

CAF bank is inadequate in its preparedness for online failures. For this I can not recommend them for charity banking. We had been a customer for 10 years and they migrated their online banking system in June 2025. It was a technical and communications disaster - badly designed, tested and full of flaws. Their call centre could not cope with the problems and banking was severely restricted for months.

13 months later and CAF were forced to close the online banking system because of insecurities. We have had no access for 8 days and this severely restricts activities like salary payments. CAF communications has been superficial and scant. Worse still CAF have no disaster recovery plan. The usual contingency of having extra staff to man the phone lines was clearly not part of CAF's forward planning. Often 120 people on hold with average of 6 or 7 hours wait to get to speak to CAF - this is a week after the system went down. This is inexcusable considering their known record for not having robust software and IT partners.

So in summary - the goodwill has been lost, and we don't trust CAF. We considerd migrating to another bank but CAF don't support CASS 7 day switching scheme so if we plan to move there is a lot of paperwork and risk of mistakes.

PS CAF please don’t paste an AI generated reply and insincere apology. It is not a good look to be spending your scant resources on PR rather than serving your customers coping with your technical disasters.

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.

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.

I am appalled that a bank that 14,000 charities rely on can be down for this long. After 6 hours on hold yesterday to simply process payroll I was told by Ros that she would call me the following morning between 9 and 10 to action. We have received no call, we aren't able to call you because we were 120 in the queue. We are now in a position where people's mortgages might not get paid, our suppliers may refuse to work with us and deliver services, and as a minimum I have lost a day and a half of essential work for our charity and the people we support. This is appalling and significant action must be taken to address the current situation and ensure it never happens again.

This really is the most appalling bank I have ever experienced. The latest now is that the website is down for an undetermined period of time - this could be hours or days. It is has been sheer misery since the roll out of the new website over a year ago now. I think the CEO and other staff realistically need to be fired for this abysmal offering.

It's been taking several minutes just to pay/authorise invoices for days with screens freezing and not knowing if the transaction is going though or not. It seems that whenever they do work on their system, there are problems and doing maintenance work during office hours when customers are trying to use the system is not very clever.

(Later received emails re security breach which explains things.)

So the site has been down all day with no warning or explanation - can only assume something disastrous has occurred. I'll be voting with my feet once this latest debacle is resolved (and they still haven't got bulk payments right!)

Wish I could give 0 stars! A clunky and old-fashioned website, which has become worse since the so-called "update". To top it all off, which modern day bank would carry out website maintenance in the middle of a weekday during office hours?!? Unity Trust is a far superior bank in every way. If you’re a charity looking to find a sensible place to store your money, choose Unity Trust every time!