Countrywide Endowment Policy Holders Beware

sea138

If you took out a Countrywide Assured endowment policy and still have it, beware!


I took my policy out in 1996 with a view to pay off my mortgage. Despite a number of "red alert - increase your premium" letters over the years, deciding to do so for some and not others, my policy has, on 12 June 2019, hit the target value with just over two years to spare.


Within the policy wording it states that once the value of the endowment hits the target value, they will move the funds to a deposit account and write to inform you of the next steps. This proved not to be the case and I had to wait until the NEXT premium was taken (1 July) before being written to with the options to reinvest the cash in the managed fund, leave the target value protected in the deposit fund and continue to pay into the managed fund or to surrender the policy. On 5 July I eventually received the forms and returned the surrender document, original endorsement and the latest endorsement when I last increased premiums in 2003.


On 19 July, by second class post, I received a letter thanking me for the documents, but they needed the original endorsement, which was sent to them with the other documents! Also enclosed was a declaration which needs signing by a witness stating that I had lost the original endorsement - despite it being sent to them with the original documents.


Since 12 June I have had to make several phone calls, received conflicting information, raised a complaint and had it rejected and yet now on 19 July I am no further forward in receiving my funds. This is clearly incompetence and deliberate delay tactics and I will be refering the matter to the FSO once I have received the funds.


I will post updates on here, but want to give any other Countrywide endowment policy holders the heads up and would be interested in hearing from anyone else who has had similar problems.

SonOf

This is clearly incompetence and deliberate delay tactics and I will be refering the matter to the FSO once I have received the funds.

If you have evidence to support your allegation that it is a deliberate delaying tactic then supply it to the FOS and you will win your complaint.

In reality, you probably don't and are getting emotional over the complaint. Try and remove that emotion and remain level headed. You tend to find people get better results that way.

Its most likely bad admin from a largely dead insurer running on limited resources using short term contract workers for staff who are not trained to the level you would like them to be because not many are willing to pay for quality nowadays as we have a race to the bottom.