PPI news thread

cot1198

Just a bit of news, don't know how true it is.
I phoned FOS today chasing the two complaints I have with Ocean Finance.
I was told it had not yet been passed to an adjudicator..... but they had taken on more staff to cope with work loads so would not be that long.

Hope the new staff know what they are doing or they could do more harm than good.

di3004

cot1198 wrote: »

Just a bit of news, don't know how true it is.
I phoned FOS today chasing the two complaints I have with Ocean Finance.
I was told it had not yet been passed to an adjudicator..... but they had taken on more staff to cope with work loads so would not be that long.

Hope the new staff know what they are doing or they could do more harm than good.

Brilliant, thanks for posting this, this is great news.:T

marshallka

High Street banks have been named and shamed for their appalling customer service in a new report by the independent Financial Ombudsman.
Banks were revealed as being far worse than any other financial institution, with the Ombudsman upholding nearly twice as many complaints against them than previously. Almost six out of every ten complaints about current and savings accounts, mortgages, loans, credit cards, insurance and investment are being resolved in favour of the consumer, the new figures show.
But in previous years just a third were being found for the consumer.

All of these people will have first complained to their bank but either had their complaint rejected or were offered inappropriate compensation.



For example, some 71 per cent of Abbey customers who first had a complaint about a current account or loan rejected by the bank later had it upheld by the Ombudsman. A whopping 87 per cent of those who had a
complaint rejected by credit card giant Capital One later had it upheld.
The Ombudsman figures highlight Britain's biggest banks as by far the worst offenders. In total there were 69,841 complaints in the first six months of this year. The whole of Lloyds Banking Group received a total of 13,760 complaints, of which 6,947 were for Lloyds TSB, 5,804 were for Halifax/Bank of Scotland and the rest for Black Horse Finance.
Barclays received 8,283, Abbey and Alliance & Leicester combined received 4,279, Natwest and Royal Bank of Scotland had 4,191. Marc Gander, from the campaigning Consumer Action Group, says: 'These complaints should never have made it as far as the Ombudsman in the first place. 'It just shows that you should not accept a decision from a bank if it rejects your complaint. You have to take it further because many are just being rejected as out of hand.
'Banks seem to be using the Ombudsman as a way of testing the resolve of consumers to see if they really are serious about their complaint.'
Banks argue that these complaints do not reflect the size of their businesses, and are relatively few compared with the number of products they sell.
However, the Ombudsman statistics also reveal the numbers that are found in favour of consumers. In this period banks were receiving thousands of complaints about payment protection insurance - a policy sold with loans and credit cards which was supposed to cover your repayments if you stopped work.
But the majority of policies were missold. Firms which sold PPI have a particularly high percentage of Ombudsman claims found in favour of the consumer. For example, in 99pc of general insurance claims (of which the majority will be PPI) made against Egg, the Ombudsman found against it.
With Lloyds TSB this figure was 98 per cent, while Barclays, loans. co.uk, MBNA, Northern Rock, Nemo Personal Finance, Tesco, the Co-op, RBS and Welcome Financial Services all had more than 90 per cent.
In other areas banks are also having more cases found against them. On current accounts and credit all the major banks have more than 50 per cent of cases upheld.
Credit card firm American Express had 64 per cent of complaints found in favour of the consumer by the Ombudsman. Across all firms the average number of complaints upheld is 59 per cent. Six in ten credit and current account cases are upheld, four in ten separately for mortgages and investments, seven in ten general insurance (which includes PPI), and just three in ten on life insurance and pensions.
A spokesman for the Ombudsman says: 'It's all to do with the way complaints are handled. If a complaint comes to us from a consumer and we think the compensation offered is fair then that does not count as being upheld.
'We only uphold a case if we believe that the complaint has not been handled fairly or if the compensation or redress is not appropriate and we have had to change the outcome.'
Insurance companies fared better. The number of complaints they received from customers was in the hundreds, while the percentage found in favour of the consumer was also far lower than the average.
• If you have a complaint about a financial company you will first have to take it up with them. If you are unhappy with the result you can complain to the Ombudsman call: 0845 080 1800, email complaint. [EMAIL="info@financial-ombudsman.org.uk"]info@financial-ombudsman.org.uk[/EMAIL] or write to The Financial Ombudsman Service, South Quay Plaza, 183 Marsh Wall, London E14 9SR.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/article-1213709/The-shame-High-Streetbanks.html

di3004

Missed your post on here earlier Marshallka, cheers.;)

di3004

PPI still mis-sold, says Which?


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7606249.stm
This is older news.


Many people are still being misled into buying payment protection insurance (PPI) to cover their credit card payments, Which? claims.

A survey for the consumers' association suggests that nearly 10 million people have a PPI policy with their cards.
But 13% - 1.3 million - bought it under the mistaken belief it was compulsory or would improve their chances of having their card application approved.
Which? said people were wasting their money buying any form of PPI policy.
"Credit card PPI is a modern day snake oil - it's a useless product, expensive and poorly designed," said Doug Taylor of Which?
"In this time of economic uncertainty, people are effectively throwing away £970 million each year, when they should be encouraged to seek independent financial advice about protecting their finances as a whole," he added.
This was rejected by the British Bankers Association (BBA), who said the insurance was a valuable "plan B".
"Taking out PPI is not a condition for agreeing to provide the borrowing facility and people are free to shop around if they want to," a BBA spokesperson said.
"Last year, a mystery shopping exercise carried out by the FSA showed improvements in staff making it clear to customers that cover is optional and new rules which came into force in July tighten the PPI regime even further," the spokesperson added.
PPI is designed to ensure that people can still repay their loans, such as credit card payments or mortgages, if they fall ill or become unemployed.

Criticism
Consumer bodies such as Which? and Citizens Advice have long campaigned against the selling of PPI, describing it as little more than a protection racket run by the banks to boost their profits.
In June this year the Competition Commission calculated that customers were being overcharged for the insurance policies each year because of a lack of competition at the point of sale.
Meanwhile the main financial regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), has fined 11 financial organisations in the past two years for mis-selling the insurance.
The most high-profile example was that of the Liverpool Victoria friendly society - now called LV - which was fined £840,000 earlier this year.
Its staff had tagged on the cost of PPI insurance to the quotes it gave to 14,500 customers who had asked for personal loans - but without telling them it was doing this.
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has also criticised PPI policies for frequently exaggerating the level of cover on offer.

Survey
Despite the barrage of bad publicity over the past few years, and the increased regulatory scrutiny, PPI polices are still widely sold.
Cover for credit cards repayments is the second most common form of PPI.
Which?'s survey of 2000 adults in the UK found that 32% of those with credit cards had also bought a PPI policy as well. Of those, 13% said they believed that taking the cover was a condition of being given the card, or that their card application was more likely to succeed if they did so.

di3004

Banks Dominate FOS Complaints Shame-List:

http://www.ifaonline.co.uk/ifaonline/news/1533502/banks-dominate-fos-complaints-shame-list

Banks dominated new FOS complaints figures naming and shaming the worst offenders for the first time.

Seven banks each had more than 2,000 new complaints in the first six months of 2009, accounting for almost half of all complaints received by the FOS.



Lloyds and its subsidiaries accounted for more than 15,233 complaints, more than a fifth of the total received by the FOS.
National IFA Sesame received 144 complaints while Phoenix Life received 508 and Windsor Life 164. Elsewhere, Santander Asset Management and St James's Place Wealth Management are both listed.
Providers Aviva, Axa, Friends Provident, Legal & General, Liverpool Victoria, Scottish Widows and Zurich are also included.
The Financial Ombudsman Service is making available for the first time a range of complaints data relating to individually-named financial businesses - including insurance companies and investment firms.
Figures cover those financial businesses where the FOS received at least 30 new cases and resolved at least 30 cases between 1 January 2009 and 30 June 2009.
Barclays and Lloyds TSB Bank each received more than 6,000 new complaints in the first six months of the year, with Barclays receiving almost 8,300.
Bank of Scotland, part of Lloyds, received more than 5,800, while Abbey National, HSBC, MBNA Europe and NatWest, part of the RBS group, each received more than 2,000. The Royal Bank of Scotland received more than 1,812.
The vast majority of complaints relate to banking and credit or general insurance. A number of complaints also relate to mortgages and home finance, while the FOS also lists complaints on investments, life and pensions and decumulation.
The data published today covers consumer complaints handled by the FOS between 1 January and 30 June 2009.
During this six-month period, it received a total of 69,841 new complaints - of which 87% related to 142 financial businesses, out of more than 100,000 businesses covered by the ombudsman.
The FOS says the number of new complaints against each business is likely to be affected by its size, but adds experts it consulted were unable to agree how size, or market share, should be taken into account.
Almost 60% of complaints were upheld by the FOS. Across the 142 individual businesses included in the complaints data, the uphold rate varied substantially between 11% and 95%.
It upheld 61% of banking-related complaints, 41% of mortgage complaints, 70% of general-insurance complaints and 42% of investment-related complaints.
FOS chairman Sir Christopher Kelly says: "I will be writing to the chairmen of the financial businesses that generate the largest proportion of our complaints workload, to ask them to consider very carefully both their own complaints performance - as reflected in the data we are publishing today - and the complaints performance of their competitors."
Walter Merricks, who is stepping down as chief ombudsman next month after 10 years in the role, adds: "I believe that putting this information into the open will now give those worse-performing businesses vital encouragement to improve - which should mean fewer of their customers having to bring unresolved complaints to the ombudsman."

di3004

Complaints data tells the real truth:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/consumer_affairs/article6839986.ece?openComment=true

If knowledge is power, then banks and insurers have gone out of their way to ensure that the public remains in wretched ignorance. The industry pays lip service to calls for more openness and transparency, then cynically obscures information that would help customers to make informed choices.

So the decision by the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) to publish data this week on the complaints that it receives marks a giant step forward.
For years the industry has concealed information about complaints-handling behind a cloak of secrecy. Customers had to be protected against the danger of misinterpreting the data. Like the apple in the Garden of Eden, such information was regarded as too dangerous for the public to handle.

Congratulations must go to the FOS for ignoring such patronising nonsense. It has allowed us to see, for the first time, which financial services companies have the worst record on customer complaints — Barclays Bank and Lloyds Banking Group this time round.

The ombudsman has wisely recognised that nothing is more likely to drive up standards than the threat of such public exposure. No company will want to be near the top of this league of shame. The data (which you can find at www.fos.org.uk) shows the number of new complaints, by business name and by overall group, that have come to the FOS in the first six months of this year.

But even more damning is the data about the percentage of cases that were resolved in the consumer’s favour. The ombudsman service is the last resort — other than court — for individuals who feel that they have been ill-treated by a financial services company. So if companies have considered the cases carefully in the first instance and the ombudsman has handled the complaints fairly, there should be few rulings in favour of the customer.

Traditionally, the ombudsman service has upheld about one in three complaints. But in some cases it is upholding 95 per cent of grievances.
The Financial Services Authority (FSA) should come down hard on companies that are so clearly flouting good practice and the standards of “treating customers fairly”.

Talking of the FSA, it is time that the regulator stepped up its own plans to publish complaints data on individual companies. Crucially, this will show the number of complaints received by each company. Many of these grievances are resolved before they reach the FOS. It should therefore provide an even clearer picture of customer satisfaction.

The FSA has promised to publish the information but says that it could be next summer before it is ready. Why the wait? It has required companies to compile such data for years and the sooner it makes it available the better.

Bring back Sid — as long as shareholders are heard
If you see Sid, tell him that George Osbourne, the Shadow Chancellor, wants a word. It emerged this week that the Conservatives are considering selling off stakes in Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) to ordinary investors — assuming, of course, that they win the next general election.

The ambitious plan echoes Margaret Thatcher’s British Gas privatisation in 1986 — famous for the “If you see Sid, tell him” slogan. That sell-off was hugely popular, tripling the number of UK shareholders overnight.

Resurrecting Sid has popular appeal. Boosting the number of individuals on their share register could potentially give ordinary voters more of a say about how the banks are run and who gets bonuses. Surely that is the least that the public deserves for bailing them out?

However, if it is going to make a difference, Mr Osbourne must ensure that it is made as easy as possible for private shareholders to have their say. Anyone who has ever trekked to an AGM will know that the turnout can be depressingly low. Who has the time to give up a day of work?
For those who can’t make it, Lloyds and RBS each allow voting by post. But given that postal workers seem to spend much of their time on strike nowadays, who would entrust their vote to the Royal Mail?

RBS also allows online voting. If Mr Osbourne decides to press ahead with the plans he should push Lloyds to do the same. At one of the banks’ rivals, Nationwide — which, as a mutual, has members rather than shareholders but still holds an annual meeting — online voting has been a great success. One in five votes cast at the last AGM was done so online.
A shareholding democracy is a great idea, but only if individuals feel that they can have their say and that their voices will be heard.

The Premium Bond fun factor won’t pay your bills
Premium bond payouts will rise by 50 per cent next month. Tempted?
Don’t be. The prize fund rate, the rate of return that a saver could expect with “average luck”, will increase from 1 per cent to only 1.5 per cent in October.
Premium Bonds remain the nation’s favourite “investment”. More than 23 million Britons have taken a punt and financial advisers continue to recommend them.
But I have never understood their appeal. They may be a bit of fun — Harold Wilson called them a “squalid raffle” — but a serious investment? No chance.

marshallka

Just found this on the AMI (association of mortgage intermediaries site) Dated 21st September, 2009 i THINK although difficult to tell but good at looking at rules of the complaints procedure. I will try and find out for sure if this is "current"...If it is then does the 5 days still stand for acknowledging complaints and just reading about the passing of complaints to other firms.. and the eligibilty of complaints???

The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS)

FOS is the independent dispute resolution service for complaints about financial services. If a customer is unable to resolve a dispute with an FSA-authorised firm, they can refer their complaint to FOS, at no cost to themselves.
The complaints handling process

The FSA rules lay down the requirements for FSA regulated firms. The definition of a complaint is wide-ranging. It is:
'any expression of dissatisfaction, whether oral or written, and whether justified or not, from or on behalf of an eligible complainant about the provision of, or failure to provide, a financial service.'
The current rules require complaints to be acknowledged within five working days, and updates to be issued four and eight weeks following receipt if the complaint has not previously been resolved. Once a firm issues its final response letter it must include details of how the complaint can be referred to FOS. These details must also be included on the letter sent eight weeks after receipt of the complaint, if the complaint has yet to be resolved at this point.
Proposed changes to the complaint handling rules. FSA is currently consulting on a number of changes to the rules around complaint handling in its consultation paper CP06/19. It is essentially a relaxation of the rules, for example, FSA is proposing that the rule requiring complaints to be acknowledged within five working days be changed to one requiring the an acknowledgement to be made 'promptly'. The changes are proposed as a result of the FSA's need to implement the European Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) and the FSA's move to a more principles-based regulatory regime.
FSA's proposed changes for complaints handling include:

• Changing the criteria for 'eligible complainants'.
• Reducing the prescriptive rules around firms' acknowledgement of complaints and holding replies.
• No longer requiring a firm which forwards a complaint (to another firm to deal with) to tell the complainant of this in a 'final response'.
• Shortening the module focusing more clearly on firms' central obligation to treat complaints promptly and fairly.

http://www.a-m-i.org.uk/your-industry/issue10.php

di3004

Cheers for this Marshallka.;)X

di3004

As also revealed from MSE Guy.

http://www.fsa.gov.uk/pages/Library/Communication/PR/2009/129.shtml


FSA unveils tough measures to protect PPI consumers





FSA/PN/129/2009
29 September 2009

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has today announced a package of tough measures to protect consumers in the Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) market and ensure they are better treated when buying PPI or complaining about it.

Firms representing more than 40% of face-to-face sales in the Single Premium Unsecured Personal Loan PPI market have agreed to review these sales and redress those consumers identified as mis-sold. Ongoing supervisory action continues with the remainder of this market place.
These measures build on the agreement the FSA obtained from the industry earlier in 2009 to stop selling Single Premium PPI on unsecured loans.

For complaints about all PPI products, new measures will tackle the key issue that too many complaints are rejected by firms and then overturned by the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) in favour of the consumer:

• new guidance (due to take effect by the end of the year) will ensure PPI complaints are handled properly, and redressed fairly where appropriate - the FOS has indicated support for the FSA’s proposed approach; and
• a new rule will require firms to reopen some 185,000 previously rejected PPI complaints and reassess them against the guidance.

In addition, the FSA is launching targeted assessment of sales practices for PPI on secured loans and credit cards; if the potential for mis-selling is identified, pro-active reviews by firms may be extended to these areas too.
Jon Pain, FSA managing director of retail markets, said:
"Consumers should not be pressured or deceived into buying PPI and they are entitled to have a policy properly explained to them. It is unacceptable that despite previous warnings about poor sales practices, backed by 22 enforcement cases and significant fines, the PPI sector still needs the FSA to intervene on this.
"And the outcome of a complaint about a PPI sale should not depend on whether or not the complainant persists past the firm on to the FOS.
"This is the last chance for the industry to show that it can act fairly, consistently and in the best interest of consumers on PPI. All firms operating in this sector should take note and where necessary get their house in order. Where we find questionable practices in sales or complaint handling, firms can expect that we will take action."