Smile UKReviews 

Just looking at other reviews, and realising the incompetence of smile/co op bank is endemic. I have been paying my visa credit card via my smile account for forever. Suddenly no more, a confusing message, and money returned to my current account. Have sent secure messages to find out why, and am fortunate my account is not due, because would be charged interest, which I always avoid. Last time I phoned regarding a problem, I spent over an hour waiting to be answered, by an unkind and dismissive advisor, so am quite scared to do that again, not to mention waiting time. I am elderly I appreciate, but I am not “stupid” and have always had control over my accounts and spending etc., Infact I am very efficient when it comes to banking. I joined smile many years ago at the beginning, an ethical bank, but so saddened to realize with this latest negative interaction with smile I am going to have to seriously consider moving banks. This has actually really upset me, and obviously others if these reviews are anything to go by.
So it is now 7/6/24 and checking the account again, and it appears the money went through over night, after it was returned to my current account the previous night. No explanation, I don’t like to ask just incase it confuses matters. Awaiting reply to my previous messages to smile/co op banks. But although it may be a nuisance to change banks (but I am advised it is much easier these days) I am not confident in smile/co op anymore. Just waiting for the next thing to happen, and very sad to actually see so many folk experiencing similar problems, especially like myself who have banked with smile for years 😢
Sent a message via messenger re call back as requested.
Received call from Justine on 7/6/2024. Justine “saved the day” as it were. Absolutely outstanding. Thankyou so much Justine, appreciate your help. It must be hard being in the direct line of so much negativity. smile should be glad they have you as an employee, I am 🤝

Bought a car, transferred the money via BACs after jumping through hoops with security. Then got locked out of all my accounts for 2 weeks. On phone for over 5 hours in total and no one seemed in the least bit bothered. Only got resolved after a direct email to the CEO of smile, then solved within 2 hours, What a surprise. In process of changing banks as we speak. P.S been banking with them for over 20 years and service is truly shocking

Mobile banking registration for new customers has not been available since May 24. This is appalling for a regulated bank not to resolve such an issue promptly.

Called to enquire. Staff have no idea.

Not smiling!!

'' There has been an error'' Please go back and try again.

Terrible joke of a credit card company. Been with them for probably ten years, have no idea why. Terrible, terrible company.
Can I have a replacement credit card? Sure, wait a month and you still won’t have it. Crap terrible company.

Echoing the other reviews, I have been with this bank for 20 years but I am closing my accounts and informing the ombudsman of how bad they are. I'm not sure they even care, they don't seem to even look at complaints but just send a letter telling you to go to the ombudsman.

Edited to report that I never heard from Emma. I've now chased up a complaint I made in March 4 times about a problem with a £600 transaction. Still no proper response. Bank doesn't care at all about customers. Staff have no idea what's happening. Glad to be moving to a bank which doesn't cause you endless stress. Suspect they are purposefully driving customers away. Why else would they be quite so bad?

Answered the call really quickly, Annila the customer service agent was really helpful and resolved my issue within a couple of minutes

I have been a customer of smile for over 20 years but they have completely gone down the drain. An urgent international transfer to a bank account in my own name took over a month and endless calls to smile to sort out. Calling from a non UK number is virtually impossible and ended up costing me a huge phone bill. No response to any messages.
Now, they have refused to pay a simple invoice to a UK account that I confirmed was legitimate. Despite further endless calls to change my contact details to a non-UK number, they refuse to update this, and insist on trying to contact me on an old landline number from 20 years ago which is absolutely ridiculous.
I have completely lost my patience and plan to move my account asap. Terrible service, financial ombudsmann informed.

Never had any issues with them to be honest over 20 years. Have never requested anything complex but has always been fine.

If I could give smile zero stars, I would. I've banked with smile all my adult life. In the beginning they were great. Now, the app is rubbish, the website is rubbish. If you need to contact them about an issue that can't be resolved online, it's nigh on impossible. No email address and enormously long queues on the phone. Goodbye smile, Hello First Direct

I have been with smile bank for many years. Locking my account so many times. Cut off several times in one go with 26 minimum minutes waiting between calls. Tried to switch accounts and blundering
stupidly with Smile I have lost my patients. So trying to switch again. They don’t seem to like if you take large savings away from your account!
I’ve gone to Chase who go above and beyond to help. My wife tried to call them on her death bed 2 days before she died from cancer with no help. Chase managed to sort it for her.
Good by Smile. Can’t seeing you smiling for long!

I am abroad and locked out of my online banking system. I cannot call the 03457212212 number from my hotel in Nepal and I spent 40 minutes calling the customer service through my husband at home, was told they would call me directly on my mobile and they have not. I am stuck at the beginning of my holiday without access to my online banking and no way of contacting the bank to unlock my account. It is an emergency and the bank lets me down.

Now revised 1 star up as, after complaining on FB Messenger I have received a callback from the Social Media team who transferred me directly to a CS agent. Apologies to anyone who was in front of me in the telephone queue.

Unfortunately there isn't an option for zero stars.

I am trying to close some old accounts and I have lost access to online/mobile banking. Therefore I need to contact the bank by phone. The waiting times appear to be constantly over 1 hour. Both mine and my wifes mobile contracts have a fair use policy of 60 minutes maximum call duration. I managed to get through after 58 minutes of waiting only to be cut off. I've tried several times since and the wait times are always over 60 minutes. I need to close these accounts so it appears I will have to revert to formal complaints/letters. This is absolutely ridiculous.

Very badly designed customer experience for online and mobile banking.

If you want to see a statement, you will be sent a code that you have to put in. However, if you want to set up a new payee, no security checks required. Also, the security checks for simple things like opening a statement often fail and you receive an error message that can then lock your account.

Not to mention the random drop outs of service where the app isn't available at all.

All for only £15.50 a month

every faster payment stopped, spent 1 hour 20 minutes on hold, the some arrogant no it all in the Fraud team decides to continually read a script regarding fraud then he would not release my funds to my account unless I stated "if this is a fraudulent transaction I will Lose MY MONEY" then advised that now that I have sent money to my own accounts (these were verified accounts by the way) I would not have the same problem again!!! well guess what I tried to send money again and to my utmost amazement it happened again and my money is now floating around the fraud dept, on all 4 occasions at no point have I had any notifications from this poor excuse of a bank to advise that the incompetents have yet again blocked my money from going to my accounts!!! Really do wish I had read the reviews before signing up to this shambles of a Bank, Incompetence appears to be systemic, I WILL BE LEAVING

I recently posted a review regarding extremely excessive wait times during multiple 'failed' attempts to speak with Smile's call centre. To be fair to Smile, I received a reply asking for more details quite quickly, and after submitting this info I was called within a reasonable timeframe to resolve matters. As a consequence, I have updated this review and upgraded my star rating to 4 from 2. I can't give 5 due to the orginal issue being far from ideal, but as my complaint has been thoroughly dealt with and a sincere apology received, it is only fair that credit is given where it is due!

Have been with Smile since 2000 as wanted an ethical bank and online suited as am disabled. Their customer service was great and agents very friendly.
Yesterday out of blue needed to send money abroad.. Disappointed to find that international transfer could only be done by phone now! Customer service agent was not very friendly and seemedca little out of his depth.
Once I started to give details he was unable to find a country called Senegal or currency used there! Numerous times I told him it was in w. Africa and he kept saying, is that South Africa?
I also gave him the name of currency used there (Cfa) but it took him several minutes to find it and offered me Burkino Faso and Sierra Leone! Every word had to be spelt out as foreign address... In the end I got so frustrated, after having waited 15 mins to get through as well, I terminated the call. I decided to transfer money to my building society and make the international transfer from there. All completed online in 20 mins with no issues. Great follow up and email confirmation.

However following my critical feedback I was contacted by a more senior agent who explained that the international transfer was by phone only due to excessive fraud and that it would be possible to transfer online again soon. He was very helpful and will look into more training for the agents.
Really pleased with the outcome of my complaint and am still real supporter of Smile for their strict ethical policies and the fact that their call centres are based in the UK.

I have been a customer for almost 25 years, and service now seems to be at the worst level in all of that time. Anything more than a nominal payment with a debit or credit card to a new or occasional payee is stopped, due to overly cautious fraud prevention controls. There are very long delays when calling customer service (an hour or more is common), and menus are unduly cumbersome to get to a call handler. However, I have found call handlers are helpful and polite if you have the time and patience to wait for someone to become available. Responses from online messaging normally take days, rather than hours. App and online banking are both unreliable, with frequent and long-lasting outages, and no proper indication of timescale for availability. What were once class-leading interfaces were overtaken by competitors some time ago.

Website seems to be not available today. Nothing on twitter or elsewhere. Presumably there are no customers left to notice?

Glad my accounts are nearly closed but they even messed that up! Has to tell them same instructions three times to get my accounts closed. Gone to Monzo and it’s like a breath of fresh air! Got tired with the ongoing issues of blocking my credit card due to ‘fraud’ - I travel extensively and they didn’t seem to like that! With Monzo you just authorise stuff through their app, easy peasy.

Smile, please don’t bother with the crappy PR type response to reviews. DO SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR SYSTEMS!!!! Your app is out of the ark!