Endowment update: payouts still falling

toonfish

mayb wrote: »

"I know many are lying, they call in and ask how they should claim" :rotfl:

Gosh - well that proves it then doesn't it - nothing more to be said!

Please read my last post toonfish - and afterwards, if you are feeling really brave, you can call me a liar too.:mad:

you may think it's "funny", but it is a fact that people call in and ask if they can claim on their endowments due to their friends doing so, or what they have read in the press.

your last post is the same as all your others - just a bitter swipe at the industry because you think you have been wronged - everyone is not out to get you.

You might not be a liar, but a heck of a lot of the complainants are. Amazingly they can remember minute details of the conversation with their adviser when it suits them, and their selective memory is compounded by the claims companies - they are parasites up there with ambulance chasers, secured loan consolidators and firms encouraging you to take out an IVA.

defender_of_the_weak

Obviously you missed my previous post, its Mr Parasite please.

I tthink it is quite funny that the comments regarding the terrible actions of claims companies seem to be posted by people whose regulatory requirement is a mortgage GCSE.

Somebodys bound to ask so just to put the record straight. 9 advanced level passes, working on fellowship this year, former examiner for the CII on FP2/3 Business Financial Planning, Retirement Options,Holistic Financial Planning, and Pensions, 21 years in financial services and not one complaint

Which are no more use now than they were when they published best buy tables and told people not to get any advice in buying endowments in the
80's.

It is obvious we do nothing more than cut and paste paragraghs, see https://www.pensionless.co.uk

All you need to be a mortgage adviser is a GCSE and a computer. Discuss

How many is a 'heck'

dunstonh

With those qualification DOTW, you would be on at least £250,000 a year as an IFA. So there must be good money in the claims business

I said it a few days ago and it hasnt changed (if anything it has got worse). There is too much taking it to extremes here on both sides and twisting of words to get a dig in.

I have no problems with claims companies when they play fair and legal. DOTW's posts here have suggested a number of times that he is one of those and his actions have stopped me using terms like parasites when I would freely use that a year ago.

Its when you have claims companies that phone people up and tell them they have been missold just because they have a certain product and know nothing about what or how it was sold that I have issues with and it is those companies that toonfish is no doubt referring to.

They have one template letter with every possible conceivable claimable event there could be, whether applicable or not and its sent in to the advising firm in a hit and hope method that at least one of the areas will stick and result in a pay out.

We get given examples of complaints fairly often to show us the sort of thing to protect ourselves from in the future. This shows us where advisers have gone wrong in the past as well as the dodgy methods some claims companies use. One claims company billed over £900 to a person who get 96p redress on a complaint. She then contacted the network asking them to pay the bill, which of course was refused. She then sent a letter in of complaint to the network saying they should pay it as she wasnt told of the charge (not that the network needed to tell her). It was then noticed that her handwriting didnt match any of the forms that arrived before and in discussion with her it turned out that she didnt fill any of the forms in but the claims company did and a lot of what was said on the forms she didnt know about and she confirmed things they said didnt happen did.

Like any profession, there are bad apples. Claims companies have theirs just as advisers have theirs.

mayb_2

Not feeling too brave then toonfish!

So much easier to dismiss arguments with words like bitter than to actually come up with anything to support your calims I see - but don't feel too bad about it others have tried it before you and it didn't work for them either.

Dunstonh is right that extremes are being taken here to some extent but perhaps if he and others like them did not try to deny the obvious we would not be going over and over the same old ground in this way. The misselling and missmangement was on a large scale true - lots of it done by tied agents probably also true - despite this fact you insist that most of the claims made are fraudulent - not true. I have no doubt there are fraudulent claims out there but there is sure to be an equal if not greater amount of genuine claims not made at all or time barred. You cannot believe in one without believing in the other as there is no real proof of either.

The discussion is immaterial really - each side claiming to be hardest done by is taking us nowhere.

The problem does still exist though that some people will not be able to pay their mortgages and others and sometimes the same people will not be getting a pension. I and others like me probably thought they had this all under control - and are understandably angry to find this is not the case.

I have never complained about the performance of my policies and no other successful complainant will have either - they would not have recieved redress on this basis. The failure beyond the misselling was the lack of information and action to deal with the situation emanating from those financial companies involved in this resulting fiasco. Earlier someone posted a link to NU - who having discovered they had made a mistake were taking steps to put this right and compensate the customers involved. How refreshing is that. I for one would always look at NU products in future and would compare them with others, together with the knowledge that they had behaved in an ethical way over this incident.

That is the sort of action that engenders confidence in financial companies not this 'it wasn't me it was him' culture of buck passing found amongst some of the posters here. Swift action to advise customers of what was going on together with plans to address it would have avoided so much of what is happening now; rather than waiting to be found out and then ducking and diving to avoid taking responsibility like some juvenile delinquent.

Mr_helpful

May be
We are not defending the genuine miss sells eg the mortgages by nationwide that tied you to buying an endowment. But Toonfish is not the only person to have been asked how someone can suceed in a claim against an adviser or salesman. The complaint system is biased in favour of the complaint. The salesman is guilty until proved innocent in the process. I have had loads of customers ask how to get some money. I have had people claim against me stating all sorts of things regarding information or risk none of which has been upheld because more by luck than judgement we never threw anything away so there are records signed by applicants for all claims. One person I know claimed he was risk adverse and should not have had an endowment yet only 6 months before had taken after over ruling advice a unit trust investing in Japan. If the salesman does not have records the claimant will win as long as he says the right things and presumably because records are not as good in the tied agent sector they are getting caned. When the FSA took over regulation of mortgages it laid down rules of how long a client file should be kept. We have made the decision that nothing will be thrown away at all as we believe the FSA rules would leave us open to compensation culture and the likes of Mr Parasite above.
DOTW I make my money by helping people to sift through the somewhat large amount of choice and I dont charge the customer fees. This is rather different from planting methods of sucessful claims into a clients mind and then enhancing selective memory on a form and clocking the client a portion of what you alledge was the clients anyway. I take it you dont get paid unless the client is sucessful which is a rather large carrot whereas I cant sell someone a mortgage if they are not buying a house. You can make a claim even if there is no way it was mis sold and stoill have a chance of getting away with it.

EdInvestor

Mr_helpful wrote: »

If the salesman does not have records the claimant will win as long as he says the right things and presumably because records are not as good in the tied agent sector they are getting caned. When the FSA took over regulation of mortgages it laid down rules of how long a client file should be kept. We have made the decision that nothing will be thrown away at all as we believe the FSA rules would leave us open to compensation culture and the likes of Mr Parasite above.

I understand that most lifecos destroyed all the records shortly before the Data Protection Act was implemented.The DPA requires a company to hand over copies of everything they have on file about a customer on demand.

Now I wonder why that might have been a big enough worry to warrant the shredding of all the files?

[I trust you're paying attention here, Mr helpful.]

mayb_2

The signing of a piece of paper does not mean that the contents have necessarily been fully understood or that the paperwork the person was signing was read either - the FSA have, as I have posted before, attempted to deal with this issue by ensuring that the paperwork is in clear and understandable language etc, etc. It is not enough to say the paperwork was signed. You know that we have had discussion on another thread where the poster knew his application had been altered after he signed it. I know that the fact find on my own policy was altered after we had made a complaint.

Asking for advice does not constitute fraud - it is for the very reasons you state here that people have to be careful how they word their complaint. It is very easy to judge what happened in the past by what people know now about endowments rather than what they knew at the point of sale. The point being that almost all mortgages being sold at one time were endowments - are you trying to say that all of those people understood how they worked? I would say that it is far more likely that at least 95% of them didn't. Now whether they can prove that fact is a matter of chance really. Did you send your clients copies of the fact finds or get them to sgn them as a true record - not an FSA requirement apparently in the late 80's early 90's. Now when you take into account all of those that were promisd money over and above the repayment of their mortgage - how many of those do you estimate had proof of that in writing? It had to be shown in writing or it was not proven and would not be part of the redress. Those people would have been given redress and nothing to address the loss of pension - savings etc.

How about if we say that if a firm is guilty of misselling on a certain scale - lets say 10% of the endowments they sold - they are made to give redress to all of the other clients sold the same type of mortgage at the same time - whether they claim or not. This would save an awful lot of time and money in the processing of all of these through the Ombudsman system and it my bring your insurance costs down overall - especially as you assert most of these claims would be found to be fraudulent and the companies would never be found guilty of misselling on this scale would they? would they Mrhelpful?

dunstonh

I was working for a bank back in the early 90s and we spent ages going through documents destroying everything over 6 years. There was a almost a paranoia back then as to what should be kept and what wasnt. A lot of what was destroyed would prove useful in supporting the advice.

There was also another period when files were being moved out of the branch into warehouses and I can tell you that they didnt treat the files well. After all, they had been sitting in the branches for years gathering dust. No-one ever needed the stuff.

The industry is more guilty of not keeping adequate documentation than it is of actually mis-selling the products in the first place.

Now whether they can prove that fact is a matter of chance really. Did you send your clients copies of the fact finds or get them to sgn them as a true record - not an FSA requirement apparently in the late 80's early 90's.

Still not a requirement now.

I go to a meeting every few months for owner/partner/directors of IFA firms in Norfolk and North Suffolk. Round that table there is only 1 firm that is getting endowment complaints and from what the director says, the majority are rejected out of hand and where there is a complaints company involved they will automatically go to FOS costing him money each time despite the evidence being strong enough to prove advice was fine. Not one has had the FOS overide his decision yet it costs him each time.

That said, there are a number of firms that a noticeably absent at these meetings and we know from stats seen that these are also the firms that tend to have the worst compliance record. They also happen to be a larger firms who operate on a salesforce model and remunerate only by upfront commission.

I have said it many times. Salesforces are where most of the "damage" has taken place. The stats from the FOS back that up. Strange that the FSA prefers salesforces to small independents when you consider where the damage is done.

Mr_helpful

MAYB

The signing of a piece of paper does not mean that the contents have necessarily been fully understood or that the paperwork the person was signing was read either

Why do we bother with signatures at all then?

As for Edinvestors waffle about the Data Protection act just shows how much she knows about it and its implication to firms.

mayb_2

Cover your bottoms Mrhelpful? I am sure that the post could not apply to you anyway could it?- however, for those the cap fits wear it.

What you are saying dunstonh is that within your own circle these things didn't happen - I am willing to accept that is true. However, you are an IFA and however hard you try you will not compete with the volume of sales from the salesforce based companies you agree are responsible for most of the misselling. Therefore, the fact remains that you are agreeing that the majority of these were missold - the majority were not sold by IFA's -ergo you are not in a position to say that most of them were not missold.