provident agents [TEXT DELETED BY FORUM TEAM]

Stony_Broke

Im_Orpheus wrote: »

There is one other little anomaly within the applecart for you.. If as they say, you are self-employed, then you are running your own business. And if you are then it is up to you to run it as you see fit. In other words, if the customer doesn't pay and as a result, you lose out not only on a commission, but you are being penalised for the customers non-payment, then it is only fair that you should be able to recover that loss from the customer... Ok so far??? ... Well, under new rules that came into effect this year, the TOTAL charge for credit TCC, shall expressly show ALL costs to the customer including all costs including commissions to agents etc. Ok????.. Well if there is a charge recovery from you the agent, then the true cost to the customer will have been affected and will NOT be taken into account by the company when setting up the agreement. .. Sorry if that all seems a bit gobbledegook, but that's law. .. In other words, the company cannot remove money from you as a punitive measure for non-collection on a delinquent account as it will breach the new rules that came into effect in February this year. Consumer credit directive 2010 ( in force Feb 2011) says ......

5.3 The TCC is defined in regulation 2 as encompassing all costs known to the creditor and which are required to be paid by or on behalf of the borrower (or a relative) in connection with the credit agreement. These include interest, commissions, taxes and any other kind of fees, whether payable to the creditor or to a third party, with the exception of notarial fees.

The relevant wording being, or to a third party, ( that's you, the agent).

Brilliant post Im Orphius, as Demoralised has rightly pointed out the pieces of the jigsaw are now slotting into place, in particular with regard to our employment status, we really needed someone like you on board. With regard to the ‘third party’ aspect of it please allow me to just check that I have fully grasped the nettle here. The way I see it in layman’s terms is, if while acting as the third party/go-between, between the company and the customer an agent agrees terms and issues credit to a customer on behalf of the company, and subsequently that same customer defaults on his/her payments resulting in the agent being fined, the agent then has the right to pass these fines onto the customer.
The reason for this being that in the law of contracts third parties have beneficiary rights despite not being actively involved in the contract. Certain criteria must be met for this law to come into effect, i.e. a valid contract must exist between the other two parties. It must be the intention of the contract that all three parties should benefit. The third party (agent) must be referred to in the contract either as an individual or as a representative. The intention to benefit must be irrevocable. And finally the third party must have a hand in the proceedings.
Taking into consideration then that as agents we meet all the above criteria we are being denied our full third party beneficiary rights. The company benefit from the high interest rates, the customer benefits from the lump sum of cash, we benefit from commissions, bonuses and incentives of which we are not in full receipt.
If the customer defaults and as a result of this we are denied our beneficiary rights by way of a penalty, this charge that we may or may not pass onto the customer should therefore be built into the credit agreement whether the agent chooses to exercise that right or not, and failure to include this in the agreement would in effect make the agreement itself invalid and therefore non-compliant insofar as the office of fair trading is concerned. Also without the presence of this information the company have no legal right to penalise agents. I am brushing upon another point here, a point that is drummed in our ears day in day out, ‘compliance’. It seems that companies such as the provi are allowed a mere 3% paperwork errors (or so they would have us believe), anything over and above this and we are told that they run risk of losing their trading licence. Am I correct then in assuming that should these charges not be defined within the agreement, when a paperwork error occurs we in turn cannot be reprimanded for invalidating a contract that would in effect already be invalid? To quote from the credit agreement, it actually states, (“The total amount you will have to pay. This means the amount you have borrowed plus interest and other costs”). Do these other costs referred to include fees etc payable to a third party? Should this be case and they do, are the company then obliged to reduce the amount of interest they recover from the customer should we have already recovered our third party losses from them, and the company in turn from us, as the customer cannot be expected by law to pay over and above the fixed contractual amount regardless of any costs? It also states, (“There are no charges for late or missed payments”). This section fails to include the ‘third party’ in the equation.
Therefore in view of this fresh information that you have provided us with I believe that we should all bombard the office of fair trading via e-mail etc, quoting the rules laid out in the Consumer credit directive with effect from Feb 2011 and the Contract’s Rights of Third Parties Act 1999, we should ask for full clarification on these matters and request that they investigate on our behalf.

demoralised

Thank you Stony Broke ,yes we have a real chance now to sort this , but I feel we should launch a two pronged attack , the route you outlined,to deal with the immediate problem of pot fines,but I think we should also explore the "worker" route to prevent future problems with deductions.If the last few weeks have acheived anything it is to show us that we can no longer trust Provident to deal with our commision payments fairly.The trust between us is now lost forever,I think very few of us now feel part of a team."Worker" rights will offer us protection in the future,with a few plus points added,without compromising our self emplyed status with the tax office.We all owe Im Orpheus a large debt of gratitude for pointing us in the right direction ,lets take up this challenge and run with it as fast as we can.

no_issue

Hi guys

Good to see some people haven't given up on this, a lot of demoralised agents in my local office are now just 'accepting' these fines even though they are being screwed on a weekly basis. We are still awaiting legal advice and need a cross section of contracts of employment from different people with differing lengths of service to the company. Orpheus' posts are very interesting and hopefully gives us something else to follow up. Although passing on a £15 fine to people who have stopped paying anyway may be a bit of a non-starter. Personally I regard these fines as theft as they are in contradiction of the Employment Act and therefore break the law. Nice to know that our employer steals money from us, the agents that it trusts with its money to go out and represent it every week.

Stony_Broke

demoralised wrote: »

Thank you Stony Broke ,yes we have a real chance now to sort this , but I feel we should launch a two pronged attack , the route you outlined,to deal with the immediate problem of pot fines,but I think we should also explore the "worker" route to prevent future problems with deductions.If the last few weeks have acheived anything it is to show us that we can no longer trust Provident to deal with our commision payments fairly.The trust between us is now lost forever,I think very few of us now feel part of a team."Worker" rights will offer us protection in the future,with a few plus points added,without compromising our self emplyed status with the tax office.We all owe Im Orpheus a large debt of gratitude for pointing us in the right direction ,lets take up this challenge and run with it as fast as we can.

I absolutely agree with you on this, we have to do something and quickly. The first opportunity I have I'm going to set to it. I simply can't believe the audacity of them as with all their high flying buisness advisors they must already be aware of our employment status with regard to workers rights and yet they continue to insist that as self employed agents we have no rights at all. Our branch manager takes the attitude, 'if you don't like it, leave your bag and there's the door'. Once we have proved that we know different he may in the future think twice before passing such comments. We must protect ourselves against this type of abuse because if we don't the company will continue to force changes upon us whilst disregarding our very being, and the only way to have a voice is to secure "worker" rights.
Incidently, although I digress, this quater our branch is minus around 1000 customers and is lagging behind in sales by at least £250,000. There is grave concern from up above, although as we pointed out from the begining, this is only what they may expect, personally I couldn't be more pleased .
With regard to the third party benificary rights, I'm really going to sink my teeth into this also. I have been thinking of the implications virtually non-stop, say for instance a customer stops paying alltogether and we have lost this money in fines with no chance of recovering it. If the company sends them to a debt collector we are still entitled to claim our share. And what if a customer goes to debt management, we are entitled to our share again. I think a whole new can of worms is open here. I aim to keep computerised records of all customers and document every fine I pay with a view to claiming every penny back at some future date, because as you say, they can't be trusted with our commission.

19england66

things seem to be on the up again...... hooooray. ive stopped doing many sales....no call backs...... im not re-issuing bad payers.....fines weekly.......also how come some fresh starts turn out to be our original write offs....... doesnt that say something....they didnt pay us.... no other company could get the payments .....so provi buy them back.... i dont think so....

disbelieve

Im ready for walking, these fines are killing me. I got fined £55.00 pound last wk which left me with £140.00 and from that im meant to pay bills, feed my kids, put petrol in my car . I just cant do it. I moan constantly to my dm but he doesnt listen, he claims you get it back and im sick of telling him you dont ever get it back. I spoke to my area manager and his response was i obviously wasnt doing my job right, I almost went for him. What are you suppose to do when you go to doors and they dont answer and they dont return your phone calls!!!!! Im at my wits end , why cant anyone help us put a stop to this daylight robbery!! Everyone agrees its wrong unless of course your management and yet there seems no way of stopping it . I want my money back!!!!!!

demoralised

The problem is that those who live in ivory towers,and have no idea how tough it is out there at the moment, are making all the rules,they seem to think that if they fine us we will finally do our job correctly.Believe you me losing one third of my commision to a customer who has missed one week is motivation enough, to then be fined on top is a step to far.I was onced asked by an AM what motivated me to do the job,I replied money,to which he said right answer,so why do they now think taking money off us will motivate us.Is this reverse phsycology,if so sorry HO it's not working, in over 30 years I have never come across a less motivated workforce,everyone, and I do mean everyone, is just going through the motions untill they can drop the shackles of provident for good.Do the shareholders realise that the people who actually earn the profits of the Home Credit division are so demoralised,get your money out quickly before the meltdown begins.

doinadaftjob

hi all,

although i havent been a provident agent for very long about 4 months it seems simple to me how the company run,
they treat their agents very poorly
they promise a lot but deliver little
sales, sales, sales is all they think about

when i am driving/collecting on my round i often think of how much a taxi driver would charge for doing the same route! more than i earn i bet.

a new customer called me recently and i did the initial RTC, but she is ub40 and only wants £150, after being hit with another £45 fine this week i WILL NOT issue the loan, i cant be bothered.

mr and mrs have 5 combined loans on my book, mr lost his job recently so has agreed to only pay half the rate every 2 weeks instead of weekly, i thanked him for making the effort to pay but my DM has refused to stop me getting hit with 2 lots of £15 fines even though i didnt issue the loans to mr and mrs as it was done by the previous agent 2 years ago.

DO NOT ISSUE ANY LOANS OR ADD NEW DOORS seems the only way to go forward with this, if all agents didnt issue for a few weeks things would change.

when i leave provident my plan is this..............on the first day of the collecting week i will get my wage slip and ask for a company chq for some loans of say £900, cash the chq and total up all the fines they owe me and including my wages i will keep that amount.
(if i left in the normal way i wouldnt trust provident to pay me correctly my week in hand as some 'mysterious' fines would appear on my last wage slip)
i will then hand over my uncollected clip and unused paperwork etc at the normal banking time.
the week before i leave provident i will also tell my customers to use shopacheck or a credit union as they are much more cheaper.

i sincerley hope a provident 'spy' is reading this post as it shows how angry and demorilised you have made us!!

a fed up anonymouse agent.

ANDREW_EX_AGENT

doinadaftjob.. I did exactly what you're about to do back in May!!!!! Refer to post 758 on page 38....... The're not gonna change. My manager at the time said wait as he couldn't see this lasting long......ha ha.... They've won. Just except that this is how it will be and nothing will change it. Shares are at their highest since this all began !!!!! Enough good agents have tried to get everyone together but failed. I bumped into a lady recently that I'd never met before but found that she had worked for provident for the last two years from the same office as me but our paths had never crossed. When I said to her what did she think about all the posts on the forums. She said "what forums, I didn't know they existed". Now what does that tell you...........................

doinadaftjob

just a thought, but has anyone ever had a leaflet or a document detailing these charges?
when i started i was told by my DM that i was not included in these charges for the first 12 weeks but any accounts that i managed to increase (even though there was decreases) would be put into a 'special savings pot' and i would get this money at the 13th week..........guess what, i havent recieved this 'special savings pot'

my queries are that if a customer goes to C.A.B. does that mean the agent will lose a £5 and £10 sum when the customer eventually falls into arrears?

if a customer goes on a waiver (a special voluntary payment scheme) does that mean the agent gets a £5 and £10 fine when they fall into arrears.

confused.