Who's good for easy business banking these days?

[Spoiler]

Another bank I'm keeping my eye on (well, acutally I've opened a business account with them as a backup): mettle

- Free banking
- Curently lets you have a balance of up to £100k, but I tend to shift my balance into a savings account anyway
- Part of NatWest

[genius]

If Barclays goes out of business, are you protected by FSCS, or not? Is the money in a Barclays account in your name, or in Coconut's? Is £85K of your money protected, or £85K of Coconut's (spread across all their account holders, meaning effectively nothing)?

It says

In the unlikely event that Coconut or our payments provider PPS, which is owned by Mastercard, went out of business, your money is only accessible by you."

Which to me sounds like the money for each individual account is secure? I don't think they would get away with lying about it?

So not a proper bank - hard pass. Although I can see the value in it for people that don't use accountant that offers FA/Xero.

What is the risk of coconut? I don't keep a lot of money in my coconut account (less than £10k atm). But interested if I should look for a different alternative.

[WordIsBond]

Which to me sounds like the money for each individual account is secure? I don't think they would get away with lying about it?

Oh, they aren't lying. They also aren't telling you what happens if Barclays goes out of business, are they?

If any group like this has anyone with brains behind it, they will be telling you that your funds are protected to £85K by FSCS. They will say so very, very specifically. They aren't telling you that. So either they are idiots or your funds aren't protected to £85K by FSCS. I'll opt for the latter, they aren't idiots.

If Barclays goes under, you'll lose your money. Yes, it is probably safe if Coconut goes under. Barclays would never fail, of course. No banks ever do, right?

I can't see using it at all, but if I did, I certainly wouldn't be leaving much money in it.

[WordIsBond]

You may as well just sign up and give it a try then; you've got nothing to lose, and you obviously don't need to switch away from your existing bank if you're not completely happy. You could well be the first person on these forums to try out the Starling/Xero integration, so please report back.

Starling / Xero integration appears to be working like a dream, FWIW.

A little bit of a pain getting all the payees sorted out, they didn't come over very cleanly in the transfer from our prior bank. Looks like all direct debits came over ok. So far, pretty happy with this.

[SuperLooper]

Starling / Xero integration appears to be working like a dream, FWIW.

A little bit of a pain getting all the payees sorted out, they didn't come over very cleanly in the transfer from our prior bank. Looks like all direct debits came over ok. So far, pretty happy with this.

Nice. Thanks for reporting back.

[adubya]

I've recently moved from Cater Allen to Starling for my business current account. The move process was all manual as dinosaur CA don't support CASS (current account switching service) so that was a bit of a pain. All done now though and Starling is great, near-instantaneous integration with Freeagent, instant faster payments, app notification of account credits. All good.