AI is blocking Britons’ payments, and the chatbots meant to fix it have just an just 11.4% success rate.
A new study commissioned by payments specialist DECTA finds that 77.2% of UK banking, wallet, and payment app users have had a payment, transfer, or transaction wrongly blocked, declined, or paused by their app. Nearly four in ten (38.9%) say it has happened more than once.
When something goes wrong, the chatbots Britons are routed to rarely resolve the problem. Just 11.4% of users say the chatbot actually solved their issue. Half (50.0%) had to escalate to a human, and 14.9% never got a real resolution at all.
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The study combines a survey of 1,506 UK adults with a two-year analysis of 159,600 reviews from the Apple App Store and Google Play across the 10 most-used digital banking and payment apps in Europe: Revolut, bunq, Monzo, Wise, N26, Sumeria, Starling, Bourso, Monese, and Chase UK. Chatbot-blame negative reviews across those apps rose 55.49% year-on-year.
Key findings included:
- 77.2% of UK app users have had a payment wrongly blocked, declined, or paused
- 76.3% of affected users ended up dealing with a chatbot during resolution, even though only 12.0% chose to start there
- 11.4% of chatbot interactions resolved the problem
- 48.0% of blocked transactions never went through and the user had to find another way to pay, or didn’t pay
- 56.7% of affected users lost hours or days to resolving the issue
- 27.6% were embarrassed at the point of failure, often at a checkout
- 10.0% completed the payment using a different app or bank afterwards
- 65.2% of UK consumers trust a human agent most to fix problems with their money; just 5.4% trust the chatbot, a 12-to-1 preference
- 24.5% have no faith in the frontline of customer service, picking either the chatbot or “neither, I expect to have to escalate”
- Chatbot-blame negative reviews across Europe’s 10 biggest money apps rose 55.49% year over year
The four most common problems chatbots fail to resolve, based on the app store review analysis, are identity verification (16.85% of classified chatbot-blame reviews), declined transactions (16.09%), login and access issues (12.74%), and account suspension (11.23%).
There is also a notable perception gap. Only 13.4% of UK app users consciously feel their app is over-cautious with their money, yet 77.2% have had a payment blocked. The 64-point gap suggests Britons treat each block as a one-off rather than as evidence of a wider pattern.
DECTA’s Gabriel Stefanak said: “The whole point of a well-built digital banking platform is that the problems users complain about never reach them in the first place. Identity edge cases, account decisions, declined transactions. Those are the moments where infrastructure either does its job or hands the customer to a chatbot that can’t help them.”
The survey was fielded between 27 April and 4 May 2026 to UK adults aged 18+ who use at least one of the named banking or payment apps and had used it within the past month. Age and location quotas were applied to match the UK adult population.
App store reviews were scraped using Apify across the 10 named apps. One and two-star reviews from 1 April 2025 to 30 April 2026 were compared against 1 April 2024 to 30 April 2025 to surface year-over-year movement. Each negative review was classified twice, first to identify chatbot or AI-blame sentiment, then to tag the underlying problem the user was trying to resolve. Results are reported in aggregate across all 10 apps; no app-by-app grading is published.
