rev:text
| - For those who don't know the principle of Tangerine, it's a bank without any brick-and-mortar branches; they claim to offer an alternative to traditional banking with their online services. To compensate the fact that they don't have any branches, they offer phone customer service 7 days a week 24 hours a day + online chat sessions. If you really want to talk with a real human in front of you, they have this "Café Tangerine" where you can talk to Tangerine employees. Cool concept!
Pros:
Given that their only physical presence is the café Tangerine, they do a huuuuge amount of savings on rent expenses; that makes them able to give A LOT of services for free that the other banks can not afford: for example, a free checking account with unlimited transactions, for everyone!! They even give money for free: when you refer a friend, both of you win a 50$ reward in your account (sometimes it's only 25$). Now let's talk about their online banking: it's ok. There are very useful features with their mobile app, such as the one that allows you to deposit your cheques with just a picture of the front and the back of the cheque. Other banks do that too, so nothing exceptional, it's the same as the online service I have with RBC, but still pretty useful and it works very well.
Cons: I guess they had to pay a price for all the savings they do with their no-branch system, and the price to pay is definitely a lot of problems with their customer service.
The chat simply doesn't work. EVERYTIME I tried to chat with somebody it says: "All of our chat team Associates for Saving and Chequing are online with other Clients right now. Please try starting another chat session later.", and it's not me in particular, I saw the same comments about the chat service in a lot of other reviews.
Their phone service: terribly long wait time, always.
Regarding the 50$ awards when I refer a friend, yes it does work, and I made 150$ referring 3 friends; BUT I always had to run after them to have the reward, which means waiting forever on the phone to talk to somebody.
For me as a young student who has a lot of free time it's not a big deal, but for dynamic professionals, I guess they have other things to do than running after 50$ rewards and that they would rather pay fees and have a good service.
Regarding the service at their Café, I went once and it was ok. It was fast to deposit a cheque, but for more complex questions, they just connected me to the phone help. They were very friendly, simple, less boot-licker than RBC (lol). It was very relaxing to sit and have a coffee there.
Overall : the Cafe is a cool concept, and it's a good bank if you only want to do online transactions and save a lot on banking fees. I use my Tangerine checking account to manage a family budget, so 99% of the operations are just online transactions to other accounts; in that point of view, I am totally satisfied with Tangerine, but I would never use it for day-to-day banking.
|