Aviva - Endowment payout 10 years later!

Dunvegan

Hi,

Yesterday we received a letter from Aviva, telling us that an endowment policy that ended on 13th August 2013 was now available to claim - nearly 10 years after it matured!

We have files for every dealing regarding these kind of things and can find no evidence that we have ever been contacted about this before by Aviva.

Would appreciate some kind of help from you all on this - surely they should be paying us interest on top of that final sum, having sat on it for 10 years? what is my next move? should I involve the Financial Ombudsman?

Appreciate any help from anyone who has had a similar experience - thank you.

BarelySentientAI

Why do you suddenly want to jump to involving the Ombudsman?  They are for dealing with complaints where a satisfactory resolution can't be reached between the customer and company.  As far as I can tell, you haven't even made a complaint!

Do you even know if they already have included interest or extra growth?

Hoenir

Your next move is to contact Aviva . Then see what develops from there. 

dunstonh

We have files for every dealing regarding these kind of things and can find no evidence that we have ever been contacted about this before by Aviva.

Did they have your address correct?    If a policy hits maturity and the address is incorrect, they will wait a while to see if you get in contact but will ultimately employ a tracing company.  That can be many years after the event.

Why didn't you contact them?

Would appreciate some kind of help from you all on this - surely they should be paying us interest on top of that final sum, having sat on it for 10 years? what is my next move? should I involve the Financial Ombudsman?

There will either be investment returns or interest.   You wont get extra on top of those.   Why would you need to involve the FOS?

TheBanker

Dunvegan said:

Hi,

Yesterday we received a letter from Aviva, telling us that an endowment policy that ended on 13th August 2013 was now available to claim - nearly 10 years after it matured!

We have files for every dealing regarding these kind of things and can find no evidence that we have ever been contacted about this before by Aviva.

Would appreciate some kind of help from you all on this - surely they should be paying us interest on top of that final sum, having sat on it for 10 years? what is my next move? should I involve the Financial Ombudsman?

Appreciate any help from anyone who has had a similar experience - thank you.

If you have files for everything, then why didn't you contact Aviva about 10 years ago to enquire why you had not heard about your maturing endowment policy? Or at any point in the following 10 years?

This is the question an Ombudsman is likely to ask, if you make a complaint that ends up with the FOS. 

MWT

dunstonh said:

We have files for every dealing regarding these kind of things and can find no evidence that we have ever been contacted about this before by Aviva.

Did they have your address correct?    If a policy hits maturity and the address is incorrect, they will wait a while to see if you get in contact but will ultimately employ a tracing company.  That can be many years after the event.

This still seems like the best question so far, if the OP has not kept their contact details updated, and didn't initiate contact when the policy reached maturity then it is hard to lay any blame on Aviva.

Phoenix72

I doubt the OP will be back - they posted a very insulting response to the first response which got removed and I suspect a ban.

BarelySentientAI

Phoenix72 said:

I doubt the OP will be back - they posted a very insulting response to the first response which got removed and I suspect a ban.

I hadn't even spotted that!  I do get a lot of insulting responses though, so it wouldn't be surprising.