I've heard negative things about their online banking and customer service, but those were a while ago so I'm not sure what the state of play is now. Could be worth a try, I do like their ethics.
Their online banking is fairly primitive, but it does the job. One thing which I find particularly funny is that if you want to have a standing order which continues indefinitely, you have to put a value of 999 in the "number of payments" field. I would have thought having a tickbox which says "Continue payments indefinitely" would be better from a user perspective.
Their (Smile) online banking is "not bad for a financial institution", and if that sounds like damning with faint praise ...
Particular nits are:
- pressing the browser 'back' button triggers an immediate logout
- they don't use email for anything except to tell you they've sent you a "secure message" that you have to log in and read
- no data export (though there are greasemonkey scripts)
Their customer service I've found to be fine unless you want anything usual, complicated, or to be done in a timely fashion. Much like any large company, really
I've also found the customer service to be pretty good for the standard stuff but there is a blurry line between smile and The Co-operative Bank that confuses them.
For example, I can pay in a cheque or withdraw funds over the counter in a Coop Bank branch, but if I want to set up a foreign bank transfer I have to use the an online secure message. When I asked why I was told over and over "smile is an online bank". Which I suppose is true, up to a point.
The one almost inexcusable omission from their online banking is any way to download your statements. You have to scrape the data from the pages themselves, and infuriatingly, they display the page of most recent items in a slightly different format to older pages, making it a pain to merge data scraped from different pages.
In lesser annoyances, they make you do a stupid amount of typing to log in, about the only bit of which is actually secure is two randomly selected digits from your 4-digit PIN. All other info is insecure: account number, sort code, first school attended, yada yada yada. All in all they make you enter something like 30 characters spread across 3-5 input boxes and two pages, all for about 6 bits of actual entropy. Unless, of course, you're the sort of person who when asked to tell your bank what your first school was, replies "8EOHzxdO6QnJ".
I must admit I haven't personally used them so I can't comment on either of those things, but from a purely ethical point of view you are not going to get much better from a leading bank.