Dozens of charities have signed an open letter to CAF Bank, expressing their frustration with its ongoing online system outage and urging the bank to produce an improved contingency plan.
Since Friday, CAF Bank’s online portal has been down, meaning some of its 14,000 charity customers have been unable to pay staff and suppliers and have had to wait several hours trying to access assistance over the phone.
The letter, signed by more than 60 charity CEOs and finance leaders at the time of writing, says that charities have been wasting many hours of the day with “significant cost implications”.
“This is causing serious operational issues which are having a major detrimental impact on our organisations' ability to function,” it reads.
The letter states that communication throughout the period “has been minimal” and calls for “a more workable contingency plan to be put in place”.
Alison Taylor, CAF Bank chief executive, today acknowledged the letter and said her organisation was working with outside experts on a comprehensive investigation.
“We want this to be fixed as soon as possible, but we cannot restore access to the online service until we are assured the issue is safely resolved,” she said.
A CAF Bank spokesperson confirmed this week that it had shut its online services due to “attempted fraud”, adding that it was in contact with the relevant authorities.
Problems paying suppliers
Charities including Citizen’s Advice Hampshire, the Bridgend Centre, Refugees Welcome North Somerset, Amaze and the Equality Trust are among the letter’s signees.
Rebecca Lea, chief officer of the Bridgend Centre in Cheshire, authored the letter and said the outage was bigger than the disruption last year following a system update, motivating her to act now.
While CAF Bank is focusing its assistance on charities with payroll issues, Lea said her community support charity has 15 invoices to suppliers that it cannot pay, and risked incurring late penalties.
“I can’t pay that because it's not payroll and I can only ring up for payroll – it's just all a bit of a farce,” she said. “It's just disrupted relationships with suppliers as well.”
Emeka Forbes, chair of the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust, told Civil Society that he has been unable to pay his staff so had offered to make advance payments to workers from his personal accounts as an emergency measure.
“Our bank is holding our cash to ransom, meaning we can't make payroll,” Forbes said. “Our own staff are at risk of financial hardship through no fault of their own.
“Thousands of people working for charities across the country could be pushed into hardship in the same way.
“It is the worst failure of support from a bank to its customers I have ever seen.”
Kevan Hodges, chief executive of Down’s Syndrome charity 21 Together, said that his 13-strong team were also worried about payroll.
"People are concerned that wages won't get paid because of this, and that's just stressful when they have bills to pay,” he said.
