Complaint Review: Aspiration Bank

My experience as a customer of Aspiration Bank (parent company: Aspiration Partners Inc which owns broker/dealer Aspiration Financial, LLC and registered investment advisor Aspiration Fund Adviser, LLC) is similar to the dozens of BBB complaints and social media complaints by other customers of Aspiration's banking services and of its Redwood Fund and Flagship Fund investment products.

Not only was Aspiration's transition from their old banking provider Radius (the old Aspiration Summit account) to Coastal (the new Aspiration Spend and Save Account) been a complete disaster, but at the same time they were doing the transition they got a huge venture capital investment and decided to run a massive advertising campaign which resulted in a huge increase in customers and they didn't (and still don't) have the support structure in place to provide adequate customer service.

For the past few months it has been almost impossible to get customer service unless you complain on social media and even then it is mainly an attempt by Aspiration's social media rep to put on a good public relations face because there basically is no help. The company rep on Twitter/Facebook will occasionally time out from his non-stop posting on Aspiration's official account about the environment, bashing of "the big banks", or from his bigoted xenophobic racist habit of correcting customer's grammar on social media (Aspiration's social media rep is apparently unaware that many people, including many immigrants, speak English as a second language and thus don't have perfect grammar) to tell an upset customer "Hey there, we'll try to get back to you ASAP", and there is rarely any actual followup. A problem that would be answered in five minutes at a large bank by making a phone call can take days or even weeks to be resolved at Aspiration.

Aspiration turned off their live chat support in January when they got a huge influx of new customers. Support emails often go unanswered for days. Phone supporthas been virtually non-existent for the past few months, you can expect to be on hold for hours and then get cut off without ever speaking to anyone (or getting a call back). This has been going on since January and their social media reps have been saying since January "we're adding more staff, it will be better next week" and two months later it hasn't gotten any better and customer service is still worse than any bank or financial institution I've ever dealth with.

There have also been numerous complaints by many customers about delays in ACH and bank transfers, delays in direct deposits, problems transferring money out of Aspiration to other banks, even problems selling the company's investment funds. Plus, complaints about what I consider bait and switch: their Summit checking account was originally advertised as paying a high 1% interest rate and then it was abruptly changed to their new 0% interest Spend checking product and in order to get interest you need to constantly switch money into their new savings product "Save" and add money to the account every month.

What their co-founders Andrei Cherny and Joseph Sanberg seem to be doing recently is trying to jack up the company's valuation for their personal gain (and to attract more venture capital investments)...classic case of unethical wealthy technology company execs that want a big payday and don't care if the customers and little guy gets hurt in the process. There have been plenty of complaints on social media by people who couldn't pay their rent or bills on time because they couldn't get their issues with their Aspiration accounts resolved in a timely manner due to the lack of customer service and unforgivable incompetence shown by this company . I would love to hear an explanation from self professed "do gooders" Cherny and Sanberg as to how it is OK to put growth over the interests of customers (many of whom are low income and moderate income...a demographic that Sanberg's non-profits claim to help). I would also like to see the two of them do the decent thing and publicly apologize because there is absolutely no excuse for the horrible lack of customer service. "Do Well Do Good" is a great marketing pitch, but when the end result is the elite lining their pockets at the expense of the little guys , then it makes Aspiration a worse option than any of the "big banks" and definitely not an ethical financial company in my eyes.

Bottom line: I am so glad I kept my accounts open at the "big banks" and didn't entrust this company with large sums of money or setup direct deposits when I decided to try this pseudo bank (Aspiration is a SEC registered broker dealer not a registered bank) because after my experience with them I wouldn't recommend Aspiration to my worst enemy.