I couldn’t find an appropriate topic for this, so made one for this article what I found.
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The Co-op is good with food allegedly.
At those prices they better be.
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Between my wife and I we used to have about 15 accounts with Co-op (Smile). That’s now down to 3 including my wife’s credit card and a joint account which we could close now everything’s moved to Monzo. It’s useful for paying cheques into though.
But, first they decided they weren’t interested in small businesses, so we moved that.
Then they redesigned their website, replacing a bad one with a truly awful one. Then limited phone support. Then kept taking online / app banking down for long periods at the weekends for “maintenance”.
Any wonder we moved to Monzo?
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This was the grovelling apology on Thursday:
Dear James,
I’m writing to you today to personally address the issues we have had with The Co-operative Bank Mobile App over recent days. First and foremost, I would like to thank you for your patience whilst we worked hard to resolve the issues with our App and I wholeheartedly apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
We are always investing in our technology to improve the capabilities and security of our digital services. Unfortunately, a change we made recently resulted in our Mobile App becoming unstable during a period of heavy usage, and so we were forced to take it out of service whilst we rolled back this change.
We will continue to monitor this closely over the coming weeks and if we require any further maintenance to ensure the App continues to perform as it should, we will inform you with as much notice as possible so that you can access your accounts to make any payments or changes before this takes place.
Although we have now restored digital services, I understand how frustrating it is when you are unable to access your preferred way of banking. I want to assure you that if you have suffered any financial detriment due to the disruptions to our service, we will work with you to make that right.
This isn’t the level of service we pride ourselves on and we are working hard to improve the experience for customers like you who choose us as their bank.
Yours Sincerely,
Nick Slape
Chief Executive Officer
I’m only a customer because they gave me £250 on the recent referral scheme. I’ll be CASSing out as soon as there is another offer.
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My son applied for a Co-op current account in February, in order to take advantage of the £125 switch offer.
Two months on, no progress. They have his application and his ID, as requested, and still no account number or sort code allocated.
When he rings he is just told the team dealing with applications are busy.
Think we shall be writing the £250 from that promotion off as, even if they open an account for him, they will no doubt claim that not entitled now as offer closed, despite the delays being of their making!
I think the challenge here is anyone who has any real interest in Internet management has probably already left. My guess is for the segment of customers who remain they probably only log in online monthly at best so won’t even notice.
And i agree with @ndrw
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I think you are probably representative of many coop customers. It does the basics and therefore the need for change is so low (understandably) that you, and they, don’t
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We’ve brought our business account here from the CoOp because their online functionality was incredibly inefficient. When they re-designed it I wrote to them explaining everything that used to work and no longer did and they basically said “live with it”.
The only advantage I can see they have over Monzo, and it is a big advantage, is the ability to receive foreign payments as some customers will not use Wise.
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Just logged in to Smile today as I remembered they were redesigning their web interface. It’s done. I felt 20 years younger. Very 2003.
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Don’t get me wrong it’s definitely more modern that the previous iteration. Better fonts etc but still far too much white space and lack of functionality
I wonder how many moaners actually quit…
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Could you not provide those customers with the bank account details Wise provides you? Then to them it will look like a normal account they are sending payments to.
We have a separate Wise account but often companies refuse to use it as it’s not a recognised bank.
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Bloody hell, I just sent a transfer from my account to an existing payee of FIVE POUNDS and 1 minute later I got an email saying I need to call them ‘regarding a recent transaction on your account’.
Last time was a bit more understandable - I sent nearly a grand to a brand new payee quickly after receiving money into my account. That time, they made me answer 5 minutes worth of questions about whether I wanted to send the money and made sure that I knew I wouldn’t be able to get it back.
If it’s anything like that again I’ll probably close the account. I get that they want people to avoid fraud, but I’m sending £5 to an existing payee - what appears fraudulent about that?!
Also, how does it take a whole day for a faster payment to complete? With all my other accounts, the money is moved in at most 2 minutes.
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I gather that fraudsters start with a small payment as a trial so smaller payments may be more likely to trigger fraud alerts. That said, if it’s someone you’ve paid before you do wonder.
Starling has queried me in similar circumstances recently with equally small payments to regular payees.
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At least with Starling you can just tap a few buttons and it’s sorted.
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There is that for sure!
Given the way fraud checks are getting strictly, I reckon it’ll be all but impossible to transfer money in less that five years 
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I owned a co-op bank account two weeks ago and have made a total of 3 payments since then.
Two payments were £1 to setup new payees, and the third was a larger transfer to an existing payee (my monzo account). All these payments were blocked. A 100% failure rate 
Co-op notified me by email on the first occurence but I received nothing for the second and third. The payments just sat there, but I could see something was wrong as the transaction date always showed as today…
In each case I had to speak to fraud for around 15 minutes going through the script (which is entirely there to absolve themselves of any responsibility if the transaction turns out to be fraudulent) … It’s amusing the first time and I understand that it could stop someone losing money, but quite frankly I’m sick of it now so will be closing my account…
This is what I think @ndrw said in another thread, these checks are getting so onerous that eventually you won’t be able to transfer anything to anyone without signing some sort of waiver every time. Not every transfer is a scam.
I could understand:
- high amount to a new payee that does not have the same name as you and isn’t a recognised business
- repeated high value payments in a short space of time
If they need to put a checkbox or warning on the payment page then fine, but blocking it entirely is excessive I feel.
I have wondered what sort of information they have when doing these checks. Can they see the age of the recipient account? If it was opened 3 days ago it would be more suspicious than one opened 5 years ago. And if paying a business, can they verify the reference? I had a payment to Amex blocked once, I wonder if they can take the reference (which will always be the card number when paying a bank/credit card provider) and query that with Amex to see if the account owner name matches.
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