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October 24, 2014 
Daniel Lee Asda is arguably the biggest and the cheapest supermarket in the UK and they have been growing and doing very well in recent years. Their history goes back to the 1920s though when a group of Yorkshire dairy farmers formed Hindell’s Dairy Farmers ltd.
After a number of different acquisitions, in 1949 they changed their name to Associated Dairies & Farm Stores Limited. The Asda name came about in 1965 when they merged with the Asquith chain of three supermarkets and Associated Dairies which brings us nicely back around to Asda, which is an abbreviation of Asquith and Dairies.
During the 1980s, Asda Stores Ltd was a subsidiary of Asda MFI plc following a merger between both Asda and MFI. With their stores based mainly in the North of England, Asda began to expand further south in 1989 by buying the large format stores of rival Gateway Superstores for £705 million.
10 years after this, Asda would be the subject of a buy out from Walmart who, on July 26th 1999, bought Asda for a whopping £6.7 billion and that saw all 229 of their stores go with them.
Coming in to the modern day and Asda launched their own financial services, similar to the likes of Tesco and Sainsbury’s, where Asda simply attaches its brand to products provided by other companies to make them more appealing to customers. They offer a wide range of services like insurance, credit cards and loans.
They were also offering these products whilst mis-selling Payment Protection Insurance, or PPI as it’s become known as. That’s right, Asda, a company whose strap line is “Saving You Money Every Day”, which has also landed them in the news, has been mis-selling PPI on a mass scale to their customers.
Many people have had a credit card or a loan with Asda Money. If you are one of these people, but you’re unsure whether you’ve had PPI, we can carry out the necessary checks directly with Asda to find out, so you don’t have to.
Paperwork or no paperwork, you can still launch an Asda PPI claim with us today. Simply fill in our online claim form to the right hand side of this page and we will send you out a PPI claim form. Once, you’ve sent it back to us you can sit back and relax while we work on settling your claim for you.
Asda PPI Claims
November 13, 2014 Daniel Lee Part of the retail and business banking arm of Barclays, Barclaycard is a global payment business and was the first credit card introduced in the UK when it came into service in 1966. Barclaycard enjoyed a monopoly for a good few years but in 1972, the Access card was introduced which was used by the likes of Lloyds Bank and NatWest Bank.
However, the Barclaycard wasn’t the first payment card introduced in the UK. Both American Express and Diners Club introduced their payment cards in 1963 and 1962 respectively. Out of the two cards, American Express was seen as Barclaycard’s main competitor.
A good few years down the line, Barclaycard became a part of the Visa network and they’ve gone on to also offer MasterCard and American Express versions of their card.
They make some bold claims too, stating they are the leading issuer of credit cards in Europe with 10.4 million customers in the UK and 10.8 million customers outside of the UK.
In the UK, Barclaycard is currently issuing one in five credit cards, making it the leading credit card issuer in the UK at this moment in time.
With over 10 million current Barclaycard customers, and potentially millions more who no longer have a card, you could be forgiven for thinking millions of Barclaycard customers may have been mis-sold PPI on their accounts. Well, you’d be right.
Add to this the fact that in 2011, Barclays bought the credit card arm of Egg from Citigroup, thus seeing a further 1.15million credit card customers added to the Barclaycard number, and the fact that Egg were fined £721,000 in 2008 for mis-selling PPI, and you’ve got an enormous number of Barclaycard PPI claims.
It’s easy to see why the Barclays PPI bill currently stands at a grand total of £5 billion, and rising fast, to cover their costs to compensate customers.
With millions of people yet to make a claim, could you be owed money via a Barclaycard PPI claim?
Why not launch your Barclaycard PPI claim with the experts today as you could potentially be on the first step to a claim worth thousands. All you need to do is fill in the form on the site, we’ll send you a PPI claim pack out, once you’ve sent that back to us, you can rest easy while we launch your claim and keep you posted every step of the way.
Barclaycard PPI Claims
October 23, 2014 Daniel Lee As a result of the merger between two North East building societies, the Northern Counties Permanent Building Society and the Rock Building society, both of which were established in the 1800s, Northern Rock Building Society was formed in 1965.
Northern Rock expanded in the next 30 years by acquiring 53 smaller building societies and most notably, in 1994 they got the North of England Building Society.
Also during the 1990s, they chose to demutualise and float on the stock exchange in order to be able to expand their business more easily. This led to them being able to gain promotion to the FTSE 100 index in the year 2000 but they were quickly demoted back to the FTSE 250 in December of 2007.
Pardon the pun but the bank fell upon hard times and during the financial crisis in 2007, they sought and received a liquidity support facility from the Bank of England after experiencing problems in the credit market.
The bank was nationalised in February 2008 as a result of two unsuccessful bids to take the bank over with neither being able to full commit to repayment of taxpayers’ money. Thanks to this, the Government took ownership away from shareholders without reimbursement.
In January 2010, the bank was split into two parts; assets and banking. In June 2011 the bank was officially put up for sale and in November 2011 it was announced that Virgin Money would be buying Northern Rock for £747 million up front with further payments of £280 million. The sale went through on January 1st, 2012 and in October of that year, Northern Rock plc was renamed Virgin Money plc.
Having had their fair share of troubles in the last few years you’d be forgiven thinking that they couldn’t go through anything else. Well, if you’re aware of the scale of the PPI mis-selling scandal, you won’t be surprised to learn that Northern Rock are just as guilty as the other lenders involved in the Payment Protection Insurance scandal.
Not only are they guilty of mis-selling payment protection insurance, in 2010 two former directors of Northern Rock were fined by the Financial Services Authority and banned from working for a regulated financial firm again.
Former deputy chief executive, David Baker was fined £504,000 for misreporting mortgage arrears data, and the former credit director Richard Barclay was fined £140,000 for also failing to ensure accurate financial information.
The two fines that were received by both former employees were reduced as they were both cooperative and admitted to their misconduct among other factors. The fine received by Mr Baker was cut from £720,000 but it is still one of the biggest individual fines levied by the regulator. Mr Barclay faced a £300,000 fine but this was slashed to the £140,000 he eventually received.
Although they’re not at the same level as the likes of Barclays, Lloyds and Santander who have all set aside billions to cover their costs for their part in the PPI scandal, Northern Rock still have millions that they need to pay out.
The holding company for any Northern Rock PPI claims and liabilities, NRAM (Northern Rock Asset Management) claim that they have attempted to contact every single customer that has been affected by the PPI mis-selling. This is akin to asking a burglar to contact their victim to ask if they want their stolen belongings back! So far as we are concerned, it should never have been left to NRAM to contact customers, it should have been the regulator who contacted them.
Are you sat reading this now thinking that you haven’t been contacted at all, or you’ve moved house yet you still haven’t been contacted?
You are far from being alone, we hear from Northern Rock customers regularly who haven’t received any contact, from NRAM.
There are approximately still 7 million people out there who haven’t made a claim against mis-sold PPI. You could be one that is owed thousands so why not start your claim today and leave the hard work to us?
Northern Rock PPI
October 23, 2014 Daniel Lee A UK based bank and former building society, Abbey National’s history goes way back to 1874 when the Abbey Road & St. John’s Wood Permanent Benefit Building Society was founded and was based on Abbey Road in Kilburn.
The society moved to a new headquarters in 1932 when they took up residence in abbey House at 219-229 Baker Street which they occupied until 2002.
An interesting fact is that Abbey employed a secretary whose sole job was to answer the mail that was sent to the address for Sherlock Holmes. This is because his fictional address was of course, 221B Baker Street.
The Abbey National Building Society was actually formed in 1944 when Abbey Road Building Society and the National Building Society merged. During the 1970s and 80s, Abbey National gained a reputation for innovation.
Abbey National was a very early user of computer systems and in the late 1970s, all of their branches moved on-line to a real-time system which maintained customer accounts. Under their Chief General Manager, Clive Thornton they introduced a new cheque account and a new type of savings account.
In July 2004, Abbey National plc and Banco Santander Central Hispano announced that they had reached an agreement on the terms of a recommended acquisition by Santander of Abbey. The deal was approved by the courts and Abbey became a part of the Santander group on November 12th 2004.
Abbey were fined £800,000 in 2005 for throwing out complaints from customers who should have received compensation after they were found to have been mishandling mortgage endowment complaints.
Another huge scandal hit not only Abbey, but the whole of the banking industry, is the mis-selling of Payment Protection Insurance. As part of the Santander Group, Abbey PPI claims equate to a significant percentage of the £1+ billion currently set aside by Santander to cover their costs for compensating customers. This bill continues to rise regularly when Santander release their figures to the city.
It couldn’t be simpler for you to launch your Abbey PPI claim with us today.
As Abbey were responsible for 6% of the PPI market and there were over 34 million PPI policies sold, that’s over 2,000,000 Abbey customers who could be owed.
In order to start the ball rolling, so to speak, you simply have to complete the online form to the right of the page and we’ll send you our PPI form out. It takes no longer than two minutes of your time, we don’t even need account numbers. Once we have it back we make a start on your claim and keep you updated every step of the way.
Abbey National PPI Claim
August 11, 2015 Daniel Lee For those of you that don’t know, the FOS or the Financial Ombudsman Service is a service that was established in 2001 as a result of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. The aim of the service was to help settle disputes between consumers and UK businesses that provided financial services such as banks, building societies, insurance companies, investment firms and so the list goes on.
Earlier this week, the FOS released their latest figures and they show that PPI is still topping the list of complaints.
So, how does a complaint end up with the FOS? Basically, if consumers receive a rejection to a complaint that they’re not happy with, the FOS can take the complaint and look at it independently.
Two thirds of new complaints that were made to the FOS during the second quarter f the 2014/15 financial year were about PPI. So far this year, more than half of the PPI cases that have made it to the Financial Ombudsman Service have been upheld in favour of the consumer. The fact that over half of complaints are still being rejected unfairly by banks is further proof of the industry not treating it’s customers fairly, and attempting to wriggle out of paying compensation.
It’s also come as no surprise to us that packaged bank accounts were the second most complained about product with over 7,000 new complaints received in the same period.
The FOS handled over 157,000 cases during the second quarter of the financial year and of these 157,000, 88,000 were new cases.
It’s not a surprise that PPI is still top of the list when it comes to the most complained about financial products. The total amount of PPI compensation that has been paid out so far is £16 billion and the banks have estimated that the final bill is set to reach £25 billion.
As has been proven in the past, the banks can’t really be trusted and our experts have worked out that the total PPI bill should in fact be closer to a staggering £42.5 billion. We’ve calculated this by taking figures that are available to the public through the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and with some simple maths; we’ve found that the banks are continuing to lie to the public.
As far as the packaged bank account complaints go, we expect this to rise even more in the not so distant future. We expect the compensation payout bill for the banks will run into £BILLIONS given the success rate of claims made to date both via banks and through the Financial Ombudsman Service.
Have you been mis-sold a Packaged Bank Account or PPI? Maybe you’re unsure, or maybe you can’t remember your account details. Don’t worry, we don’t actually need any account details as we can obtain these direct with your bank or lender.
We’ve claimed back thousands of pounds for thousands of our customers and you could be next.
Start your claim with us, the compensation claims experts, today and you could be a stone’s throw away from reclaiming thousands of pounds.
PPI Complaints
June 8, 2015 Daniel Lee Bank accounts; almost everyone has one. They’re almost a staple requirement in everyday life with people needing them so that they can get paid from their job, to make direct debit payments and so the list goes on.
Well, after the launch of a new switching initiative last year, over 1.2 million people have switched their current accounts from one bank or building society to another.
The new scheme that was launched was meant to make switching easier for customers and it would seem that there are two banks that are benefitting from this new service.
The free “current account switch service” went live in September of last year and the first lot of data has been released by the Payments Council.
The data shows that from October 1st 2013 to September 30 2014, a total of 1,203,334 switches took place which is a 22% increase on the 985,600 current accounts which were switched during the previous 12 months.
There are two banks that benefitted the most from this are Halifax and Santander. The Spanish owned bank, Santander from January 1st to March 31st 2014, gained 60,882 new accounts but the lost 23,566 and it was a similar story for the other big winner, Halifax. They gained 65,636 new accounts but lost 24,078.
There are three banks who took quite a beating when it comes to the accounts gained and the accounts lost. Lloyds notched up quite a big amount of new accounts with 60,877 joining them but the fact that 76,079 left them renders their gains useless.
The Co-operative Bank are trying to regain the trust of the general public with their products and services being caught up in a large scandal last year they only gained a total of 4,463 new accounts but lost many, many more than that; 12,315.
Finally, there were two major losers in this period. Two of the larger banks in this country, two banks who can’t afford to keep making losses after their fines for mis-selling PPI. They are Barclays and NatWest.
Barclays gained 10,947 new accounts but they lost almost three times that amount with 27,414 leaving them and it wasn’t any better for NatWest who gained 11,482 new accounts but saw 29,740 customers leave them.
There are some very obvious pros to having a bank account. Some of which we mentioned earlier like being able to pay direct debits, you get paid into them. It’s a safe way of handling your money and you can see all of your incomings and outgoings.
Well, there are also some not so obvious cons to having a bank account. For example, are you paying a monthly fee for your account? Well, we estimate that a majority of packaged bank accounts have been mis-sold.
If you don’t know what a packaged bank account is, then it’s worth doing a bit of reading if you’re looking at switching your account as bank staff are known to be pushy when it comes to selling these accounts.
They will try and sell you the benefits, more often than not they include ‘free’ breakdown cover, ‘free’ mobile phone insurance to name just a couple. The cost for these accounts depends on the one that you opt for and the bank that you’re with as it can range from a small monthly fee of £5 or can be as much as £30 a month.
Other things to look out for are being told that getting one of these accounts can help you to get a mortgage in the future. This isn’t true at all and it counts as mis-selling.
So, if after reading this you didn’t know that there were other options for a current account or if you were told that you would stand a better chance of getting a mortgage in future with one of these accounts or if you quite simply weren’t aware that you were paying a monthly fee for your bank account, why wait around?
Start your claim with the experts today, just fill in the form on this page and we’ll launch your packaged bank account claim today.
Packaged Bank Account Claims
