Plum: Smart Saving & Investing

My youngest daughter told me about this app and to be honest I thought it was a scam of some sort... the idea of giving my bank details out made me nervous. Then my oldest daughter told me she had been using this app for a while now so I decided to give it a try. I’m so glad I did! You can choose how you save, casual, normal or beast levels and Plum skims the odd pennies and pounds out of your account that you wouldn’t - and don’t - miss. I chose the highest way to save, beast mode and I saved £272 in the first month... But how I don’t know!!! I genuinely haven’t missed one penny of it, so it was a lovely surprise when I went into the plum account and saw what I had! My husband has now joined up and he didn’t want to check it regularly, so left it well alone. He’s now wondering how the heck his Plum account has so much in it! I can’t recommend this app highly enough... I plan not to withdraw anything until next Christmas, it should be a tidy amount by then

I’m not or ever have been one to save, as I never want to transfer money into my account and if I do I just end up transferring it back and spending it. Plumb saves for you little bits at a time that you don’t even notice or make an impact on your balance. And it all adds up very quickly you’d be surprised, I was. You can tell it how hard or soft you want your savings to be at any time or switch it off all together. If you do decide you want to use the saved money you can withdraw it and it is in your account the same day. I’d highly recommend this for people that may find it hard to save as they say. Every little penny counts and it all ads up very quickly. I’ve been using it for around a year and never had a problem with it. So if you want to save without the hassle this is the App for you!

The time taken to withdraw money from your account, deposit into your wallet or into your investment is incredibly slow. Considering bank-bank transactions can be done almost insta royalty, it’s baffling that moving money from your account to the savings wallet takes 2-4 days to arrive. Investments are slower and seem to take 2 weeks. Money that I manually deposited for investment was never invested due to an ‘issue with the buy order being submitted in correct timeframe’. I only found this out by asking them why my fund hadn’t been invested so it doesn’t seem to get flagged automatically. The fact it was never flagged or re-submitted automatically in the next buy order is a problem for me - this should never have been an issue. For 2 years in, I think the fact that money can still get ‘lost’ is something Plum need to resolve ASAP. You shouldn’t be able to lose your clients money in your system and rely on them chasing you to pick it up. Until this is fixed Plum will never be a 5-star service.

The plum app is fantastic, you can alter how much the app saves for you and these small but often transactions build up so quickly and rather unnoticeably. I’ve been using the app for one month now, I’ve put £50 away manually and from the round-ups and automatic transactions I’ve managed to build up around £120-£130 In total. (I have mine set to “normal”) I was unsure about the app in the first place because I didn’t want it to save too much money for me and then leave me skint, which would then leave me waiting ages trying to withdraw my money back out of plum into my bank account... Which leads me into my “but” very nicely... If I had one issue with the app it’s that it seems to take 3-6 days to move the money from the bank to plum and I’m assuming it’s the same on the way back out. If you save too much and need to withdraw this money in an EMERGENCY situation it’s probably going to cause you a lot of bother. However, guys & girls, this is a savings app. The idea is to set it up for reasonable savings you can afford to forget about and leave them to build up! I would recommend this app to anyone - whether your terrible at saving or you already save pretty well, this app will surprise you. It’s simple and affective. Plum, if you can work on making the transactions faster for the future, it’ll make all the difference and it would be a 5 star from me. Good job

I downloaded your App at the suggestion of a friend. Great concept as my bank don’t currently offer the round up facility of my transactions. Within an hour you indicated that Sky were overcharging me - for broadband - I don’t have broadband with Sky? You’re notification could ‘suggest’ rather than assume. I declined the offer to look into my Sky broadband and was asked why on the chat. I tried to reply to it but unless there’s a pre-empted response provided I can’t tell you why - so why ask?! Today, I received a message asking me what I thought of my first day. Based on the above. I chose one of the two pre-empted responses ‘Needs work’. Your chat asked ‘Why did you choose the answer you chose?’ Again, no keyboard functionality available just a ‘Never Mind’ response to choose? Again, why ask if you don’t allow me to answer directly? I work in Technology, pitting the customer journey first and foremost and this is not an impressive start!