Adrian

It's the second time we've used mobimatter.com to purchase an eSIM for our holiday travels. For both of these countries we've travelled to they've offered a good range of SIM options, different providers and amounts of data, all reasonably priced. Both times the SIM has worked absolutely fine, they make life so easy when travelling overseas. The site is now our go to place for this need, for future travels.

I am in the process of purchasing a new home with my fiancée, and will be using some of my savings which a few months back I moved into a Trading212 cash ISA. My solicitor told me that for anti-money laundering purposes I needed to evidence a statement showing all the transactions on this account.

Trading212 hasn’t thought to provide any functionality to generate or request a statement in either its app or web interface, so the only option I had was to use chat. The inevitable bot I was greeted with did to its credit actually understand my request (so rare!) and responded “For your cash ISA, we can provide a transaction statement (Deposit and Withdrawal statement) that contains all deposits and withdrawals made in your trading account. If you wish to receive such a document, please connect with a human by typing ‘live chat’.”

Why on earth the need for human intervention, when their computer systems had recognised exactly what I required, and correctly identified what they could provide to fulfil my request?

That was at 09:36 this morning. A human eventually responded in the chat at 14:47. That is over FIVE hours later… with me sitting at my computer working, continually keeping an eye on the chat. Rushing to the loo when I needed it – and rushing to fix a light lunch to return to my computer, knowing that if I wasn’t sat there when a human did eventually respond they would just terminate the chat. Don’t they realise we need toilet and lunch breaks, and that such a huge wait time is completely unacceptable?

The human shared a pdf transaction statement with me in the chat, with a download hotspot next to it. But it didn’t work, it did nothing; and it’s not me, I have an IT background and know what I’m doing. They shared again – it still wasn’t working. This is basic chat functionality, to be able to share a downloadable document! Eventually they said they’d email it to me. When the email hadn’t arrived after a few minutes I asked them to try resending – but the human had now vanished; with no warning, no goodbye, no “is there anything else I can do for you today?”. Just gone. What rubbish.

Thankfully the email did eventually arrive. But the transaction statement is the oddest one I have ever seen. Normally on a bank statement, for each transaction the date is on the left of the line and the amount on the right. Not Trading212 – the amount appears in the left-hand column! And the amounts which normally would be right-justified are left-justified. Plus – and I have never, ever seen this on a bank statement before, they don’t print the pence at the end of an amount if they are zeroes, like some restaurant menus don’t for their prices. So a deposit of £433.00 is shown just as ‘433’. And an interest payment of £13.20 as ’13.2’. This together with the left justification of the amount column makes reading the statement very hard indeed. Whoever wrote the code to generate this report, have they never seen a bank statement before?

The correct formatting of a bank transaction statement is basic, basic stuff. How could they get this, their downloading of a document from chat and their customer service wait times so badly wrong? For me, it’s just not worth it for the slightly higher interest rates they pay – clearly achieved by spending so little on customer service! I’ll be taking my money elsewhere…

Bought an Egypt eSIM for a touring holiday around the country - good choice of providers, good prices, and the one we purchased worked fine, everywhere we went.

We will be back next time we travel overseas!