welcome finance

src007

Moneyineptitude wrote: »

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It is a matter of public record that Welcome are not upholding any more complaints than they have in the past. The percentage of successes is static and has been for the past year.

Success with Welcome does not depend on "who opens the envelope" because several people are involved in the decision making process. Each complaint is "quality checked" before a response is posted to the customer.

I agree Welcome do want to avoid referrals to FOS, but they are not upholding non-legitimate claims in order to do that. Like any Bank, they will try to avoid the £750 it costs for an FOS referral. But they are not auto-upholding complaints the way Halifax was back in March/April.

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Hey, are you defending what in my opinion was the worst large uk company in history?

Their business model was to sell extremely high APR loans to people who couldn't afford them (sometimes people would be paying back £80k for borrowing £25k).

All their PPI was mis-sold. It was literally stupid. I've spoken to many, many people who told me the company ruined their life.

Once you were in arrears with them (as huge chunks of their client base were BY DESIGN) they would charge £10 per phone call + fees through the roof for missing payments. Call after call, after call, after call, after call.

No wonder individuals from the company are now getting six figure fines.

http://www.cityam.com/latest-news/ex-cattles-directors-fined-600k-fsa-misleading-investors

Think of the human cost, misery and fraud highlighted by this article.

'Cattles declared a pre-tax profit of £165m for 2007, when it had in fact lost £96.5m with half of its £3bn loan book in arrears, the FSA said.'

One point five BILLION loan book arrears for a company.

What a happy day when they went under. One of the happiest moments of my working life.

[Deleted User]

src007 wrote: »

Hey, are you defending what in my opinion was the worst large uk company in history?

Hardly. Just refuting some generalisations and inaccuracies.
I'm aware they mis-sold PPI on a grand scale.

My post was about their current approach responding to complaints, redress, and the FOS.

I agree they were one of the worst offenders in blatantly mis-selling PPI.

src007

Moneyineptitude wrote: »

Hardly. Just refuting some generalisations and inaccuracies.
I'm aware they mis-sold PPI on a grand scale.

My post was about their current approach responding to complaints, redress, and the FOS.

I agree they were one of the worst offenders in blatantly mis-selling PPI.

Fair enough.

I agree that each complaint should be looked at on its own merit. My point being that almost all Welcome complaints have merit. I think there is some truth to the theory that they uphold to avoid FOS because they know they'll lose if the complaint gets sent on to them.

Your post seems to assume that Weclome may be in the 'right' and the consumer may be 'wrong' on some occassions. That's probably true but very rare.

src007

Also, this is a classic example of why the right wing - ''you're in arrears because you agreed to the stupid payments'' argument is rubbish.

People are in arrear for many, many reasons, some of which are of a persons own making, but many of which are out of someones control.

The ONE POINT FIVE BILLION Cattles loan book arrears figure from the article shows that being behind with payments can be a problem of disign rather than of ''individual stupidity / lack of responsibility '' - which I sometimes hear on this forums is the cause of all ills.

Before we know which arrears are down to fault, which are due to bad luck and which are a result of being misled, its kinder to assume the problem is down to circumstances out of someones control.