Do you trust Financial Ombudsman?

Cotta

masonic wrote: »

It is of course your choice, but I fear this figure of £50, now mentioned, will find its way into the decision unless challenged. Once the decision is made, both parties have the option to object to it, at which point it will be referred to an Ombudsman for a final decision. This may introduce a further considerable delay and the added burden of the Ombudsman overruling a colleague. So if there is an opportunity to discuss the figure prior to the decision being made, I'd take it.

I doubt this figure of £50 has much basis to it.

Is there a compensation chart the Ombudsman works off? I could easily say £50 is not enough but what do I counter it with?

masonic

Cotta wrote: »

Is there a compensation chart the Ombudsman works off? I could easily say £50 is not enough but what do I counter it with?

From my decision letter; "On the face of it, some complaints might seem similar to others. But every customer and every complaint is unique – and compensation needs to reflect the impact on the individual people involved. We don’t add up awards for each individual error. Instead, we look at everything that’s happened - and then take a step back and decide what’s fair overall."

The real question is what do you consider a reasonable amount to be paid to reflect the impact the matter has had on you? For example, would £100 for the distress and inconvenience of being unable to use your account or debit card, or update your address when you moved, plus another £100 to cover lost cashback and interest, seem fair to you?

Cotta

masonic wrote: »

From my decision letter; "On the face of it, some complaints might seem similar to others. But every customer and every complaint is unique – and compensation needs to reflect the impact on the individual people involved. We don’t add up awards for each individual error. Instead, we look at everything that’s happened - and then take a step back and decide what’s fair overall."

The real question is what do you consider a reasonable amount to be paid to reflect the impact the matter has had on you? For example, would £100 for the distress and inconvenience of being unable to use your account or debit card, or update your address when you moved, plus another £100 to cover lost cashback and interest, seem fair to you?

I would have thought £50 for each of the months I could not get access to my account = £200 plus the missing interest and referral bonus.

This maybe unrealistic but I also think £50 is.

JuicyJesus

Cotta wrote: »

Is there a compensation chart the Ombudsman works off? I could easily say £50 is not enough but what do I counter it with?

Here's FOS' technical notes on what they feel is appropriate for distress and inconvenience payments - note that this is separate from and in addition to (for example) reimbursement of costs and lost interest:

http://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/publications/technical_notes/distress-and-inconvenience.htm

masonic

Cotta wrote: »

I would have thought £50 for each of the months I could not get access to my account = £200 plus the missing interest and referral bonus.

This maybe unrealistic but I also think £50 is.

£200 might be reasonable if you switched your main account to TSB and as a consequence of the problems had to get your regular income and payments moved again to a different account while you were locked out of TSB. This would have taken a lot of work on your part, and perhaps some considerable distress of not knowing whether payments would have been made to/from the right account at the right time.

On the other hand, £200 + lost interest/cashback is probably unrealistic if you were using TSB to hold savings and didn't have a specific need for the money during the time you were unable to access your account. In this case, there is no doubt that the services were unavailable to you, but the impact on how you would have normally used the account is much less.

Cotta

masonic wrote: »

£200 might be reasonable if you switched your main account to TSB and as a consequence of the problems had to get your regular income and payments moved again to a different account while you were locked out of TSB. This would have taken a lot of work on your part, and perhaps some considerable distress of not knowing whether payments would have been made to/from the right account at the right time.

On the other hand, £200 + lost interest/cashback is probably unrealistic if you were using TSB to hold savings and didn't have a specific need for the money during the time you were unable to access your account. In this case, there is no doubt that the services were unavailable to you, but the impact on how you would have normally used the account is much less.

It was the latter, a new account was setup with my salary diverted to it, I should wait until the Ombudsman makes his final decision but this has been useful to armour myself with appropriate information. I am disappointed that even now TSB have tried to hide their shortcomings by denying that I had online banking setup until the Ombudsman spotted my online footprint prior to the IT meltdown.

JuicyJesus

Cotta wrote: »

It was the latter, a new account was setup with my salary diverted to it, I should wait until the Ombudsman makes his final decision but this has been useful to armour myself with appropriate information. I am disappointed that even now TSB have tried to hide their shortcomings by denying that I had online banking setup until the Ombudsman spotted my online footprint prior to the IT meltdown.

I'd say personally £100-200 plus lost interest and cashback. £50 would be lowballing. The compensation that's appropriate does depend on the actual impact on you - if you were, say, unable to access your wages for an extended period of time or missed payments on bills and credit commitments then that might merit more D&I money than if you didn't really have any actual issues. The debit card PIN thing is what would push this up to £100+ for me.

Put it another way, if I was TSB's complaints handler and the facts were as you put them in front of us I'd have offered £200 straight off the bat. Although again, we only have one side here.

It's not clear whether your complaint is with a FOS adjudicator or if it's at the ombudsman's decision stage (i.e. the adjudicator has issued their decision and you've objected to it, so it has been referred up). Either way I would suggest you say to whoever is appropriate why £50 is inadequate, explaining specifically how you have been affected and how you have been inconvenienced. If you haven't yet had the adjudicator's decision, you will be given the opportunity to make further comments when rejecting it (if that's what you want to do) and asking for it to be considered by an ombudsman. I'll reiterate that £200 is not an unreasonable amount to expect for something that you did not have any role in causing.

Samsung_Note2

Used them a couple of times and i feel as long as you give as much detailed information as possible,its hard for them to not agree.
Id hazard a guess its the cases where they lack information and hard evidence where people loose.

Not just FOS but other Ombudsman services ive had good success...just clearly state your problem and back it with facts and you have a very good chance.

JuicyJesus

Samsung_Note2 wrote: »

Used them a couple of times and i feel as long as you give as much detailed information as possible,its hard for them to not agree.
Id hazard a guess its the cases where they lack information and hard evidence where people loose.

Not just FOS but other Ombudsman services ive had good success...just clearly state your problem and back it with facts and you have a very good chance.

That goes for complaints in general really; a simple, calm outlining of what's happened, how it's harmed you, what you want as recompense will virtually always do better than people who go on weird OTT rants or don't give anything to really go on.

You see people on the published decisions who ask for £150,000 because their card got declined (I didn't make that up, it's a real case) and wonder how they thought that would make them look like anything but a loon.

peterbaker

One of the problems with the FCA/FOS approach to awarding compensation is that it constantly suggests that there is a standard scale to be referred to. It is a very lazy schoolboy amateurish yet high-handed abuse of power type approach to applying fairness, especially when sloppily applied as "business at usual" after what we all recognise as a major incident linked to catastrophic IT failure at one bank, TSB.

FCA should have ruled long ago that the TSB problem was a major incident and that special rectification measures were being overseen by them, ultimately leading to a special scale of compensation not by applicants to FOS but by forcing TSB to write to all customers from their own special unit set up to handle the fallout. They should not be adding to FOS workload. FOS really is used as a convenient least resistance sink for smelly stuff by both FCA and the banks. It is a hideous special interest group behaviour when you look at it dispassionately.

TSB is one of nine banks that is legally obliged to offer basic bank account services in the UK. Over the past few months it has seemingly breached that legal requirement with impunity. What have FCA actually said about it? I wonder whether the best they have done recently is this market-wide initiative that has resulted in a startlingly different new "SQI" webpage at each of the bank's websites: https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/fca-mandated-information-current-account-services

From this, do we deduce that some banks (like Barclays) offer extensive continuous service and help, but others (like Santander and TSB seemingly do not, or claim it is "Not Possible".

If the startlingly different approaches to this new mandatory FCA disclosure rule are to be taken at face value, then no way can there be a standard scale of compensation for denial of access to normal banking services.

There is certainly a reason that we have laws which provide a minimum standard of access to banking for all, the rich, the comfortable, like most of us bashing keyboards here, and the poorest, who may not yet have decided where they sleep tonight. Access to banking is effectively a human right in today's modern European society.

It is therefore laughable that insulting compensatory amounts at the level discussed are being ruled as fair by FCA/FOS when access to banking is denied. In discussion of how compensation should be calculated, I have seen no reference to laws and regulations (e.g. PSRs) that require TSB (particularly as one of the nine) to offer a continuous minimum banking and payment service.

You have to laugh else cry when you see the amount of shoulder shrugging and suggestion that customers should have mitigated their losses by first using their crystal balls to work out how long TSB would continue to faff up the whole fiasco before getting back to any kind of normality in banking and payment services. How was any customer to react to having access to their own money written off for a indefinite period, but being told it would be fixed soon, all the time apparently whilst they should have been using their own time (however much was necessary) to set up alternative services, borrow temporary replacement of their money, and then calmly carry on until the storm passed?

I have seen no-one discuss how there would have been a sizeable group who would not have been able to walk into a bank next door to TSB and open a replacement account at the drop of a hat. They may well have been routinely refused as poor credit risks ("do you already have a bank account?" "Yes with TSB but ..." "Sorry if you already have one we are not obliged to offer you a new one") yet they still have the right of access to basic banking via the nine. How was that problem actually handled by the other eight? Have those types of customer just dropped off the radar now because they were reduced to rock bottom by their personal fallout from the TSB fiasco?

It is even more worrying in that FCA is supposedly the regulatory guardian of 'Principle 6 - Treating Customers Fairly', because fifty quid or 150 quid is a sick joke for anyone who had a bank account of any description which they could not access. A 3hr delay on a European flight costing five quid can result in much bigger compensation for the people involved than a 3 month cessation of proper banking facilities? Something is very wrong at FCA/FOS if they think fifty quid is fair for anything.