More action is needed from high street banks to tackle charity banking challenges in Northern Ireland, the regulator has said.
The Charity Commission for Northern Ireland said positive steps had been taken towards recognising and engaging in this area but there was more work to be done.
The regulator was responding to a report, called Charity Banking Challenges, which was produced by the Charity Finance Group in partnership with the Civil Society Group and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations last month.
The report was based on the findings of a survey, conducted in March, of 1,899 representatives from small and medium-sized charities.
It found 92 per cent of charity respondents had experienced at least one banking difficulty in the past two years.
In Northern Ireland alone, two-thirds of respondents (67 per cent) said they had encountered problems with adding or removing signatories from their account and 43 per cent said their trustees had needed to attend in person to verify their identity.
Punam McGookin, head of charity services at CCNI, said she hoped the report would act as a catalyst for change.
“Charities, which are struggling to survive week to week, deserve support but instead face additional hurdles and red tape,” McGookin said.
“A lack of understanding of how charities are run contributes significantly to the problem, which this report confirms.
“While there have been positive steps towards recognising and engaging with this issue, more action is needed from high-street banks.”
Among the respondents from Northern Ireland, 74 per cent said their charity used online banking and slightly more than half of those who did so said their charity had procedures in place to detect or prevent online fraud.
More than half of the Northern Irish charity respondents (55 per cent) said operating accounts was an issue and almost half (47 per cent) cited paying in cash and cheques as a frequent challenge.
McGookin said appropriate training for banking customer service staff was one action that could help ease these problems.