Sorry for the really long post that is about to follow but I’ve received my final response that I wanted to share since I’ve pretty much documented everything else.
They have acknowledged a failure in the level of service and issues with the DDs and have offered £40 as their final position.
Dear Ryan,
Your complaint about Kroo Bank Ltd
Thank you for your recent communication which we received on 27 February 2023.
I’m writing to let you know that we’ve completed our review and this is our Final Response. Thank you for your patience during this time.
Our final response: We are upholding your complaint.
Your complaint points:
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You are unhappy regarding a missing payment on 26 January. When you raised this with our in-app chat system, you did not receive a response until 7 February and was told it was due to a third-party payment processing delay, although you accepted this, it was the length of time it took to respond back to you which was unacceptable
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You are unhappy that on 14 February, a bank transfer was made from your CO-OP account to your Kroo account for the sum of £., however it did not reach your Kroo account. Despite contacting us, you did not receive a response at all
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You are unhappy that your wages did not appear in your Kroo account. As a result of the delay it caused a Direct Debit and a standing order to be missed. You contacted our Customer Services team and the funds were in the account an hour later. On your Kroo statement the date and time of when the payment was received reflected when your employer sent the money, not when we completed our review, therefore the standing order and the direct debit should have been processed as normal but it was not a true reflection
Additional complaint points:
- You are unhappy you received notifications in-app to confirm that your Direct Debits would be taken on 3 March, however, these payments did not debit your account
- You are unhappy that our colleagues failed to answer any of the points you raised in-app chats
- You are unhappy our errors caused your bill payments to fail
Our Findings:
Upon review, we note that you contacted us in-app on 26 January, to advise that you were missing some payments. You explained that you had made an inbound payment and the situation had caused you stress as the payments were not reflecting on your available balance and you had no money. No response was provided to you until 7 February, this conversation was later closed.
You contacted us in-app on 13 February, to request assistance as you had attempted to make an inbound payment into your Kroo account, however this had not appeared in your Kroo account. The amount was for £**.**. You also provided us with a screenshot of a confirmation of payment from the sending bank. We failed to provide you with a response, so you contacted us again on 23 February to advise that you had independently resolved your query. You let us know that you were concerned that our Customer Services had failed to provide you with a response to your in-app chat.
We can confirm this payment settled into your account on 14 February at 10:49am. We use the Faster Payments network to send and receive payments. This means that payments sent from most UK banks should arrive in your account instantly, but can take up to 2 hours and in exceptional circumstances can take longer.
On 27 February, you called our Customer Services at 09:05am to advise that you were expecting your wages into your account, however the funds had not been received into your account. We failed to respond until 1 March, where we confirmed that your payment of £****.** was successfully credited into your Kroo account on 27 February at 09:48am.
You reached out to us in-app on 4 March, to advise that you had received 3 notifications on 3 March to advise that your Direct Debits to ‘Vodafone’ would be taken. However, those payments did not debit your account as expected. You explained that, due to those payments not being taken, “This has now caused me to go into difficulty with Vodafone as it’s now registered late payment fees against the 3 device plans. This really is unacceptable ”.
We responded on 6 March, to advise that the Direct Debits had been set up on 28 February, and the reason the Direct Debits did not successfully debit your account was because Direct Debit payments need to be set up 5 working days before their due date. We also told you to contact ‘Vodafone’ for further information.
You responded to advise that you were unhappy with our response as it did not answer any of the points that you had raised, as we had sent you notifications to advise that they would be taken on 3 March and the amounts, which indicated that the Direct Debits had been set up successfully. In addition, you also advised that, “My airtime payment to Vodafone was also taken a few days after getting a notification from you. Not only has this been an inconvenience, it’s caused my bills to fail ”.
You told us that the conduct of our colleague in-app was dismissive as they referred you to ‘Vodafone’ for further details regarding your query. No further responses were provided to your query, so you contacted us once again on 9 March to request an update. We responded 11 March to advise that we had raised your query with our Tech team. Once they have a definitive resolution, they should be able to respond to your query.
On 28 February, we wrote to you to acknowledge that we had raised a complaint on your behalf and we would respond to you no later than the 13 March with a Final Response. Unfortunately we failed to meet our commitment and exceeded the timescale that we provided you with.
Our Response:
We would like to offer our sincerest apologies regarding the overall level of service that has been provided to you by Kroo.
Firstly, we note that our response times to your in-app queries have been disappointing on several occasions when you have attempted to contact us. Unfortunately, our customer service team have been experiencing an increase in contact, which has resulted in longer wait times for responses to our customers. We appreciate that this should not have impacted your experience, and deeply regret that it has.
We appreciate that our lack of responses would have been frustrating and displayed a level of disregard for customers that one would not expect from their bank. We would like to assure you that we are working on increasing our resources to improve our response times going forward. Although this does not excuse the level of service you received, your experience has highlighted areas of improvement around our customer experience.
In addition, you were expecting your wages to be credited into your bank account on 27 February, whilst we note that we took some time to respond to your query in-app and this was not a pleasant experience. We can confirm that faster payments usually arrive in your account instantly, but can take up to 2 hours. In exceptional circumstances, it can take between 24 to 48 hours. If you have sent a payment and it has been longer than 2 hours, we usually recommend contacting the sender or the sending bank so they can trace the payment for you. Your payment was processed as a BACS payment, which has slightly different timescales. However, we can confirm that your payment was credited in a reasonable timescale.
Furthermore, we note that you experienced some difficulties with 3 Direct Debits set up to the merchant ‘Vodafone’. You received notifications on the 3 March to advise that these payments would be debited on the same day. Regrettably, this did not occur as we are aware that there is an issue with our Direct Debits and the notifications sent to our customers. This has been escalated to our Tech team for further investigation.
We understand that this put you in a difficult position as when you set up a Direct Debits you did not expect to have to verify that the payments had been made. You expected a guarantee that as long as your account has sufficient funds that your payments are to be made at the agreed date, without any inconveniences. We can confirm, when we later attempted to debit those payments (£*, £** and £**), on 6 March, all 3 payments failed due to insufficient funds.
Taking all of this into consideration, and by way of making things right, we will be crediting your account with the amount of £40, in recognition of the time, trouble and upset this situation has caused you. This will credit your account within 3 working days.
We hope we have been able to go some way to restore your faith in Kroo. However, we understand that this experience may have impacted your trust with Kroo, and for this we are very sorry. We value your feedback highly, and we can assure you that your feedback has been passed to the relevant teams throughout the business.
In light of the above, we are not able to uphold your complaint .
