This app is almost genius!
I absolutely love this app. It is by far the best budgeting app I have used, ever. And I have used them all! It also connects to my other bank accounts and credit card accounts, so when it budgets, it budgets ALL OF THE THINGS. So great! The only thing that I hate about this app is that my paychecks are always coming in at inconsistent times. I received my paycheck one day early one time, but as of recently I’ve been receiving my ACH paycheck in late - which is super stressful. You want to know where your money is at all times if you’re a budgeter. So, that’s kind of stressful. If you reach out to support, (and let me just say, the support team is phenomenal), they will usually tell me it takes a certain amount of time for ACH’s to come in - that doesn’t change the fact that it’s been inconsistent most of the time. If the Empower team could figure that issue out, this would be the winning budget/banking app. The look of the app is incredible and aesthetically pleasing. They way it works is user friendly and I get excited to use the app. I wish my paychecks came in on time, that’s the only setback about this app.
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1/2 star rating..dissatisfied and disappointed
I made a cash app transfer of $94 to a friend. Cash app canceled because the ID I used was not valid. I reached out and got a valid ID to resend. This time it failed. This all took place on Friday May 24. I reached out to Empower and was told it takes a few days for the money to be returned. By mid week I’m reaching out again and was told there didn’t seem to be available funds for that transaction on Friday. Not true. When I pointed that out to CS I’m told they have to look into it to see what is going on. Tomorrow is May 31 and I still don’t have my money back into my account. How complicated is this? Checks and balances. Since you can’t overdraft and all transactions are listed on dashboard why is it difficult to determine what happened? By checks and balances I should have a balance and I don’t. In all of my years of banking I’ve never encountered this. CS is nonchalant, it may not be important to them however it is to me. I’ve been using Chime bank. I will be going back to Chime. I had misplaced my Chime debit card and had to wait for a replacement so I thought I’d try Empower. I should have just had my DD put on my Cash App card. I give 1/2 a star. I’m so disappointed. I would steer clear of such a bank that takes this long to resolve an issue as simple as this!
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Response from developer
Hi Grace. Thank you again for your feedback. I would like to reach out to you and let you know that we have been working hard to improve our product and customer service based on your feedback. We now have a new banking partner along with new features in our app. And we have worked on improving our customer experience. We would love to hear your feedback again.
FAILURE AND TOTAL GARBAGE
Empower is one of the most worthless and quite frankly, utterly useless “financial/banking services” I have ever encountered. Thankfully my unfortunate mistake of signing up with Empower; will be other people’s gain. I have no problem describing what a pathetic joke the feeble attempt at customer service Empower haphazardly provides to it customers. I can imagine how it would be nothing less than a total embarrassment if I had to admit to people that I worked at or was in any associated with such a deplorable and disheveled wreck of a company that Empower truly is. Seriously. I would say that perhaps Empower can bilk their investors out of more money so that their totally incompetent robot customer service staff could be trained on what “customer service” actually means. Alas, I believe that would just be an exercise in futility. I simply cannot wait to be the first person in line to attend the party that will be held upon the news of this company’s inevitable, and 100% deserved, abject failure. I can hardly contain my glee because the thoughts of Empower being dissolved into total non-existence is a delight of which I will always be ready to enjoy. Always.
TL;DR - EMPOWER AND ITS USELESS ROBOT CUSTOMER SERVICE STAFF ARE GARBAGE - JUST LIKE THEIR “PRODUCT”. STAY AWAY FROM THIS TOTAL MONEY STEALING SCAM!!!
TL;DR - EMPOWER AND ITS USELESS ROBOT CUSTOMER SERVICE STAFF ARE GARBAGE - JUST LIKE THEIR “PRODUCT”. STAY AWAY FROM THIS TOTAL MONEY STEALING SCAM!!!
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Response from developer
Hi Christopher. Thank you for your feedback regarding our customer service. I would like to reach out to you again and let you know that we have improved our customer support service based on your feedback. We now have a new customer support platform to interact with our customers and a new banking partner to provide banking service. We would love to hear your feedback again.
Not A Good Bank
I’ve Only Been With This Bank For Less Than 3 weeks and I’m Already Having Problems. The First Time I Transferred Money from my first bank to my empower bank my funds were posted and available the same day the transfer was completed. The 2nd time I transferred money i got a notification that the transfer was complete but this time my funds weren’t posted & isn't available. I Can’t Call Customer Service To Speak With Anyone I have to Email Them. All they tell me is that it takes 1-5 business days to transfer but if it is complete then That Information is Irrelevant because I’ve already done the waiting period for it to complete and I’ve got the email letting me know the transfer is complete so now I have to play the waiting game waiting on my money. This will be my last time using this bank and I will not recommend this bank to anyone , you all do not have real customer service. And I will let everyone know what I am going through. You don’t play with people money when they’re trusting u with it
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Almost Perfect App
The only opportunity I see for improvement is that I’m able to link up all my accounts except my Alliant Credit Union Account. I’ve seen some reviews where people are also having trouble linking up their credit union account. Also, the maximum you can transfer is $2,500 per week. What?!? At least make it $10,000. I was trying to transfer $10,000 from my Chase to my Empower savings account to take advantage of the competitive APY but the transfer limit is way too low. What if I needed money for an emergency and I had most of my cash in Empower?! That’s the only reason why I would not make this my primary savings account.. until they increase that to at least $10,000. The app also sometimes doesn’t open up and you have to close application and try to open it again. It’s intermittent. Other than that, this app is great. It has all your balances and investments in one place. They help you renegotiate bills which I thought was not possible at all. I also love the user experience, one of the best.
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Avoid
Doesn’t link with my credit union so can’t use most of the features advertised. It says it will but whenever I try there is a “problem. Please try again later.” I’ve been trying for 3 weeks. When I contacted support (after some frustrating and counter-intuitive discussions with a Bot) they told me there was a temporary outage with my credit union and to try again in a week. Obviously disappointed and finding this app totally useless I deleted my account. It says all my data and account details will be deleted. Yet when I attempt to re-sign in and confirm my account has been deleted it simply just re-signs me in and all my data is still there and it hasn’t been deleted at all. I don’t know why so many people are giving this good reviews. Perhaps they haven’t used it properly but I was very keen to use empower that I’d already decided I would. I decided to just do some simple tests to put my mind at ease about using a new company and they failed all of those tests: doesn’t link with external accounts as advertised, time wasting bots are the customer support, solutions eventually offered are totally inadequate and when I made my decision that this “bank” (its really a tech company) wasn’t for me I had to repeatedly email and message them to actually manually delete my account (even though the app tells you you can do it from their main menu). New companies will improve the banking experience in the near future. Empower is not one of those.
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Response from developer
Hi there, Very sorry to hear that you've run into some issues with using our app, particularly revolving around linking your credit union. If you're still interested, we'd love to discuss some of these points further, via email (support@empower.finance), or the in-app chat, but we can understand if you're already satisfied with the amount of time you've spent giving Empower a try. In any case, thank you for the feedback!
Still has a evolve both as a complete bank and financial assistant
Allows transfers with smaller limits. As an online bank with no check deposit it should support higher limits. As a bank it should still evolve, no deposit check, bill pay, checks. Transfers can take 3 business days to complete but sometimes higher than that. Even though they were giving boost intially it was tough to transfer money into the account. Now I will have hard time taking out the money. They don't even give an official withdrawal check for savings
Interest rates are good, great during the referral period, I guess compounded and paid daily in the statement, couldn't verify as I can't download it on iPhone, looks like a bug. Mentioned it to support, wasn't fixed yet.
Other features are great except for minor bugs. Transactions sometimes were showing duplicate and pending.
Other accounts don't refresh often sometimes even Weeks, so it doesn't help to know your current balances. Used it for over a month the AI suggestions just started but I just have common basic subscriptions.
Hope they get better and become a complete bank and introduce basic stuff and fix all issues
The statement share option is now visible and I got my Feb statements but it is not able to load or share until loaded. There are decent number of transactions in it
Interest rates are good, great during the referral period, I guess compounded and paid daily in the statement, couldn't verify as I can't download it on iPhone, looks like a bug. Mentioned it to support, wasn't fixed yet.
Other features are great except for minor bugs. Transactions sometimes were showing duplicate and pending.
Other accounts don't refresh often sometimes even Weeks, so it doesn't help to know your current balances. Used it for over a month the AI suggestions just started but I just have common basic subscriptions.
Hope they get better and become a complete bank and introduce basic stuff and fix all issues
The statement share option is now visible and I got my Feb statements but it is not able to load or share until loaded. There are decent number of transactions in it
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DOES NOT SUPPORT 2ND CARD OR MANY ATMS OPTIONS
My wife and I read about Empower through a financial article and it sounded like a great option for us. We had closed our Chase account and kept our PNC open until everything was switched over to cover expenses and make sure there was no lapse in bills. So once that was finished we finally got our....1 card? Empower does not support two cards for the same account. That was not disclosed or advertised or anything. It was deep within their “Help” section after we had signed up.
So because it does work with Apple Pay we thought, ok the options and cash back are a nice option so let’s get through it. Well, we finally closed our PNC account and just had empower at this point. My pay check was a live check one week because of the switching of accounts, they wanted to be sure I could have the cash. So with this live check I look on how to deposit it or cash it..... THEY DON’T HAVE SUPPORT FOR THIS. The only way you can contact them is a messenger or email and you MIGHT get an answer back in 24-48 hours even though their app says most replies are in 2 hours of the operation times. They have no answers. So I had to go to my local grocery store where they would cash it but for $8. I responded back to their for short email giving me no answers and that was 24hours ago. Other than that, the app works nicely. Just can’t deposit cash or checks. HUGE flaw when setting up this business.
So because it does work with Apple Pay we thought, ok the options and cash back are a nice option so let’s get through it. Well, we finally closed our PNC account and just had empower at this point. My pay check was a live check one week because of the switching of accounts, they wanted to be sure I could have the cash. So with this live check I look on how to deposit it or cash it..... THEY DON’T HAVE SUPPORT FOR THIS. The only way you can contact them is a messenger or email and you MIGHT get an answer back in 24-48 hours even though their app says most replies are in 2 hours of the operation times. They have no answers. So I had to go to my local grocery store where they would cash it but for $8. I responded back to their for short email giving me no answers and that was 24hours ago. Other than that, the app works nicely. Just can’t deposit cash or checks. HUGE flaw when setting up this business.
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Response from developer
Hi, thank you very much for taking the time for the feedback notice. Please be reassured that we take well notice of the improvements our customers are requesting, and we are actively working on getting a secure way to deposit cash or checks. For the $8 ATM fee, that's on Empower since the 1st fee of the month is on us. We are also taking well notice of the request of having 2 cards for a joint account. We'll continuously work on making this better for you in the next releases. Please let us know if any issues or concerns at support@empower.finance. Thanks!
good app
Empower has great sync features, and easily able to track individual categories, and it's holistic overview of personal finance is very mint-esque without the annoying advertisements. THE ONE feature I think that's lacking is the ability to group expenses by categories such as housing (under which could be rent, internet, electricity etc.) And the ability to customize the tracking feature for customized periods of time. As it stands currently, you can only look at the last 2 months, and yearly. The ability to customize these types of tracking features would make this an elite app. I think these are some of the biggest issues preventing me from buying the yearly subscription. I really like this app, it's closely behind YNAB, but needs a few tweaks!
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Infrequent Updates
I think the layout and organization of the app is decent however I take issue with the fact that my accounts are not regularly updated. This makes it near impossible to get an accurate profile of my accounts (what’s been paid, how much I owe, etc.). Most times I find myself going to an individual account’s website to get this information which defeats the purpose of having Empower in the first place. What’s worse is that there doesn’t seem to even be a means for manually refreshing account information as with some other apps I had so your only option is to delete the account and re-enter it again to get the updated info. It is really frustrating because this issue has persisted for months and nothings been done about to address or even acknowledge it for that matter. I don’t believe I will continue with Empower much longer as I feel there are better options available.
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