Ally: Banking & Investing 4+

Easy to use and easy to bank with!

I love their live chat option! It’s probably my favorite thing about banking with Ally. They are good about answering calls, too, but if you’re trying to multitask I find the chat more convenient so that in public places other ppl aren’t over hearing your conversation. It’s really easy to deposit checks and I find their app to be pretty reliable. I can’t even recall the app crashing on me more than once, and I’ve had it for many years! Unlike other bank apps I’ve used that have bn a complete nightmare. I really wish they offered business banking bc I have not bn able to find a bank that is as convenient to bank with and has a banking app as good as Ally’s. Another cool feature is you can see your total balance for all accounts on the home page, and your individual balances are listed next to each account. I know this is something my husband really wished his previous bank app had. Also, you can transfer money from one account to another via the app and the amount is available straight away! Overall, I highly recommend this bank and it’s app.

Used to be great, lately not so much

This app and bank used to be great. At some point in 2022 the app and bank started having issues. The most egregious problem I have had is, after signing in the app say “you have no accounts at Ally bank “. Depending on the situation this can be terrifying. Luckily closing the app and trying again later has brought back my accounts. No exactly confidence inspiring. Often Face ID fails to work. Sometimes it fails to invoke a Face ID check forcing me to hit the Face ID button. Sometimes it performs the Face ID verification but never unlocks the app. Fortunately this can also usually be fixed by closing the app, waiting a while and trying again. When. I can actually get it to authenticate the apps responsiveness is painfully slow. The account screen can take a long time to populate data. I have seen this behavior on my iPhone 13 pro when on excellent WiFi or cellular networks. This also happens on my iPad Pro and my wife’s iPhone. On all these devices we access other services and financial institutions without issue. I suspect that Ally made a change to their back office servers that is causing these problems but that is just speculation. I have lost trust in Ally after being a customer for many years. I opened up another account at a local account because I wasn’t comfortable having the bulk of my assets at Ally any more. This used to be a great bank. I hope they fix their issues.

Great service, but the app is bad.

I’ve used a couple of other online banking and investing apps, as well as other financial apps such as those for credit cards or loan accounts. When compared to those apps,I have found ally’s has been underwhelming, confusing, and frustrating at times. For rhe most part, I had found the user interfaces for the other apps very intuitive, easy to navigate, and have small and seemingly insignificant features that are taken for granted until you use an app that doesn’t have them. Such features include buying fractional shares of securities, without which investing in companies such as Berkshire Hathaway (stock currently valued around $450,000/share) becomes impossible to the common investor. Another capability missing from the app is the ability to manage external accounts used to fund your ally accounts - instead, there is a message that says to visit their website to manage your accounts, and while they provide the URL of the website, they could easily provide a link within that message that would take you directly to the site instead of having users exit the app, navigate to their web browser, and then manually enter the URL.

Despite how I feel about the app itself, I enjoy ally’s services. This is the only reason that I am leaving this review, in hopes that it will be viewed by the powers that be within the ally organization and that they will take action to overhaul the app.

Developer Response ,

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