For all their charm, digital banks still leave me tearing my hair out
I admire London’s digital banks. But three events in the past month have made me realise I’m not parting ways with my high street bank any time soon.
The first was dodgy transactions that started showing up on my Revolut account. I was being charged for random TfL tube journeys. I had a feeling this was odd, partly because I use an Oyster card, and partly because, er, I wasn’t in the country. I cancelled my card and ordered a new one – but I struggled to find anywhere or anyone to report the fraud to. So that’s a few quid I’ll never get back.
When something similar happened to my high street bank account two years ago, I hadn’t noticed the dodgy transactions myself. The bank called me up and asked me to check them and, lo and behold, I was stunned by what I saw. Within 24 hours I had a full refund.
The second was my attempt to transfer a pension from an old job on my Monzo app. I entered the details, and a few days later a notification came back: we can’t find a pension matching those details. Perhaps I made a mistake, I thought, so I tried again but tweaked the information.
I got a terse message back: “We already tried to look for your pension. We can’t search for the same pension twice.” So that’s that: because something went wrong on the first attempt, I am now permanently banned from adding my pension to Monzo. A high street bank would have found a way forward.
The third was when I opened a new account on Moneybox. It all seemed to be working fine, but a few days on, I can’t log in. A message arrives: “Your account is currently frozen as we require more details from you. Please contact our support team.” No mention of what details are missing, and no way of contacting beyond a generic email address.
Eventually I get a reply: “We’ll come back to you in two working days.” A delay that would make even HMRC blush. If this were my main account, I’d be in serious trouble.
I’ve had my high street bank account for 20 years now. During those two decades, I’ve never been locked out of my account, nor had it frozen. And if anything happens, there is an emergency hotline.
Digital banking is great – until it isn’t
Despite all this, I use digital banking apps far more frequently than my clunky high street bank app. On a day-to-day basis, they work great – the user interface is intuitive, transactions are faster, and there are lots of great tools like spending trackers and savings targets.
But when you encounter edge-cases you realise the shiny technology can quickly unravel: it’s not equipped to deal with every scenario, and you get treated like a troublemaker, not a valued customer. At which point you feel enormously grateful for your high street bank where, somewhere in the mix, there is still a human around to figure things out.
Over the past decade, the challenger banks have been hugely successful in signing up millions of customers. But average deposit sizes remain miles behind the centuries-old incumbents. There is a reason for this, and if experiences like mine persist, they won’t ever catch up.