CAF Bank has been given an occasional mention in these pages before.

As I recall, I was talking about how it would be nice if their systems were modernized to the point where they were on a level playing field with other banks.

Be careful what you wish for.

A few months ago, the e-mails and other messaging were in: CAF were launching a brand new online banking system in early May 2025.

Great, I thought. Their current system, while serviceable, is a clunky product of the early 2000s (or at least it feels like one!) and something a bit newer and nicer is overdue. Presumably, as a small player in this field, they might have white-labelled someone else’s proven, battle-tested system? Or they’re going for evolution, not revolution, of their in-house stuff?

With my IT industry hat on, I started to wonder when they announced that they’d have an entire weekend of downtime, starting after hours on Friday, and that the new system would require all new usernames and passwords. Having to fish the text message with one of those out of my spam (who knew Android had such a thing?) was not a good start.

Three weeks on, two of our five users have yet to regain access to online banking, it’s near impossible to get through on the phone, and even those of us able to log in to the interface are having a mixed time of it.

To throw in a positive, they have finally allowed the reference (as in, the thing that appears on the recipient’s bank statement) to be varied per-payment rather than having to edit the payee.

However, the negatives I have seen with my own eyes include:

  • The CSV export doesn’t escape commas, so if someone put a comma in an incoming payment reference, you get a broken CSV file! This is the sort of mistake a first year computer science student would be embarrassed to make, so I can only assume they hired a sixteen year old to write this part of the interface.
  • The requirement to do a second factor approval of a payment you have set up, on top of the second signatory doing it, is overkill
  • Sending an SMS to every online banking user about every newly set up payee or payment is overkill
  • The search for payees doesn’t work at all (in my experience) and I have to scroll through the entire list.

Besides the direct experience, I’ve heard from churches and charities big and small about direct debits bouncing, struggles to log in, and in general, a horror show. This is particularly concerning as we are now end-of-month and end-of-quarter, and I’d bet a decent dinner some charities are going to be late paying staff because of all this.

Last word goes to this chap on Facebook:

CAF Bank comment on Facebook

In my opinion, somebody at CAF probably deserves to be sacked over this, because it feels amateurishly put together and inadequately tested.