Trade Republic customer service is practically non-existent €20,000 LOST!!!!

[Freelance]

Sent Trade R an email this morning at 8am requesting a final response letter, 33 mins later the money arrived back in my N26 account.
It appears they do read emails but only respond to ones where there's a risk of exposure to an Ombudsman's complaint....or at least that's my take on this sorry saga.

Nice of them to wish you a nice weekend and all that but so incredibly frustrating when financial institutions mis-behave like this. Fully understand that mistakes/system problem occur, but you'd expect them to have robust systems in place in the first instance and to offer a serious response when money going missing. It shows them in a really bad light when a threat of Ombudsman/Regulator action is required to elicit a response.

Roll on 2025 when any messing like this will be in clear breach of SEPA Instant enabling the sender to immediately initiate a formal complaint.

And I'd have to say that the many reports of TR's dire "support" offerings have prevented me from dealing with them, despite the attractions.

 

[Knuttell]

These organisations shouldn't be allowed scale up while lagging in actual staff to deal with inevitable fall out/ problems.

While watching a recent BBC programme on Revolut, a phrase was used repeatedly, " move fast and break things" likely this was philosophy was aped from seeing it used in social media start ups etc.

It's a ridiculous mantra/philosophy to use when starting a bank especially when the breaking things involves my money.

You get the impression that these fintechs infrastructure is made of 50 floors of bamboo scaffolding held together with bailing twine and prayers.

 

[Freelance]

Agree 100%.

I was impressed when Bafin and Bank of Italy stopped N26 from taking on new customers because of concerns concerns regarding onboarding and AML. These actions forced significant systems and procedural work by N26 and probably made N26's offering a lot better in the long term, notwithstanding the pain/cost they endured. I've had problems with Raisin, Advanzia, BUNQ, Revolut etc with very simple and straightforward transactions that certainly indicate underlying issues with their systems, procedures and staff training and in most cases I've found their support and follow-up to somewhere between poor and awful.

I've no problem with the concept of disruptors/challengers or whatever they want to call themselves this week entering the market, but their operations need to meet a basic standard and they need to be held to account. The Regulators/Central Banks have fallen well behind in this regard and until they proactively police (1) systems and (2) support with the same importance they attach to liquidity, solvency and all the other prudential stuff, then consumers will be at the mercy of these start-ups believing their own marketing hype (bs) and acting like cowboys.