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November 13, 2014 
Daniel Lee Britain’s banks have been attempting to convince us that the PPI saga is slowing down for some time now.
Indeed, some time ago when Lloyds stated they were not adding to their PPI compensation pot, some analysts and so called city experts predicted it was the beginning of the end of the biggest financial scandal to hit these shores.
However, the recent additions to the PPI bill over the last 6 weeks tells a very different story.
In the last 6 weeks each and every one of the major banks and lenders in the industry have added significant sums to their PPI bills, set aside to compensation customers who have been mis-sold the product.
Below is a breakdown of what the major banks have added to their compensation fund in the last six weeks.
Barclays / Barclaycard added a huge £900 MILLION
Lloyds Banking Group (Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, Blackhorse) added £600 MILLION
Royal Bank of Scotland / Natwest added £150 MILLION
HSBC, which also owns HFC and First Direct added £75 MILLION
Clydesdale Bank / Yorkshire Bank added £75 MILLION
Santander (including Alliance & Leicester and Abbey National) added £65 MILLION
Co-operative Bank added £5 MILLION
In total this adds up to £1.87 BILLION. Other lenders have also increased their PPI bills, taking the figure closer to £2 BILLION.
Following an investigation by the BBC, the industry regulator published it’s report into how banks and lenders have handled complaints about PPI, and the findings are simply staggering.
The industry regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has ordered 2.5 million complaints to be re-opened as it has major concerns that the banks and lenders did not deal with the complaints fairly.
How there are no fines regarding yet another example of the frankly disgusting practise by the banks is beyond me. However, I’m sorry to say that it comes as no real surprise anymore, and serves as another example of the toothless regulator that is supposedly ensuring we are all dealt with fairly by those financial institutions we place our trust in.
It is expected that the re-opening of the 2.5 million complaints, which represents almost 20% of complaints received by the banks so far, could see further compensation paid to the tune of £1 BILLION, on top of the £2 BILLION as mentioned earlier.
With an estimated 7 MILLION people yet to stake their claim, and only a third of all policies sold since 2001 having been complained about, the banks are hoping that these people don’t come forward.
One of the main reasons that people are not coming forward is simply because they are unaware they’ve been sold PPI, such was the tactics employed by lenders, hiding away the costs in the small print.
Your Money Claim are the industry experts, carrying out the checks to see if there has been PPI sold on any of your accounts, checking to see if you may qualify, and dealing with the banks throughout the process.
Having already recovered tens of millions in compensation for it’s customers, Your Money Claim are used to beating the banks.
So…why wait, you could potentially join the thousands who’ve claimed thousands with Your Money Claim!
PPI bill
August 11, 2015 Daniel Lee According to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), after last year’s record high, PPI complaints have taken a slight tumble. Despite this though, the number of complaints still remains at historically high levels.
In the first six months of this year, the FOS has said that it took 133,819 complaints about PPI, which is slightly less than the 193,054 that they took in the previous six months. Despite the slight drop, the complaints are, according to a FOS spokesperson, still at a “significant level”.
According to the FOS, PPI complaints still account for around 70% of the cases that they receive. There are still around 5,000 people a week asking the ombudsman service to look into their PPI complaints.
This number however is down from the significant highs of 2013 when there was over 12,000 complaints being received by the FOS each and every week. The 5,000 number is still significantly higher than complaints being received about any other financial product.
During the last two years, PPI has hit record levels and in 2014 the FOS has so far taken on almost 400,000 new cases.
The FOS was originally formed by MPs to settle disputes between financial firms and consumers which is why, when a bank rejects a PPI complaint, it should then be escalated to the Financial Ombudsman Service.
However, only around 1 in 10 get escalated to the FOS. This is mainly because when the banks reject an individual’s complaint, the consumer generally thinks that they must not be owed any money.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) have said that since 2011, the banks have only paid out £16bn to their customers in compensation.
PPI policies were originally meant to cover those who customers who cannot work due to ill-health or unemployment but more often than not, these have been sold to customers who don’t even qualify.
There have been around 34 million PPI policies sold since 2001 and since 2007 there have been over 13 million complaints made to firms.
It’s more than likely that the amount of complaints will rise this year as the FCA recently ordered financial firms to reopen 2.5 million complaints from 2012 and 2013.
The reason behind the sheer amount of cases being reopened is because the FCA noticed that there was a very sudden dip in the number of complaints being upheld and leading to compensation. According to the latest figures, there was £390m paid out in June which now takes the total paid back to consumers to £16 billion.
PPI Complaints
September 3, 2014 Daniel Lee Barclays has announced that they’ve made losses of £500m on the sale of their Spanish banking division. This follows after they announced their plans to shed unprofitable businesses.
At a total cost of £632m, Barclays have sold off their retail banking, wealth, investment management and corporate banking business in Spain to the third-largest bank in Spain, Caixa Bank.
Caixa Bank is the third largest lender in Span and is owned by the Catalan savings bank La Caixa who has a 72.76% stake. They are headquartered in Barcelona and they primarily consist of the universal banking and insurance activities of the La Caixa group and they also have ties to the telecommunications company Telefónica.
On top of the Spanish bank clear-out, Barclays have also confirmed that they have sold their UAE retail banking business to Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank.
With this particular deal, Barclays are set to make a pre-tax gain of £119m on the sale of a portfolio of mortgages, unsecured credit and deposits.
The British bank are set to make a loss of around £500m on the Caixa deal; £400m of which will be booked in the third quarter of this year and the final £100m in the final quarter of the year.
Early on in the last decade, Barclays expanded quite rapidly in Spain buying Banco Zaragozano for €1.1bn in 2003. These banks then continued to operate under a brand name of Barclays but they soon ran into problems when the Spanish housing market collapsed and in turn started the deep recession in Spain.
According to Reuters, Barclays shut or sold around 160 branches last year and cut about a third of their workforce in the country and in May, Barclays added that they will be cutting 19,000 jobs worldwide which is set to include a dramatic reduction in their investment banking arm so that they can focus on areas where they have a competitive advantage.
Barclays £500m Loss
October 7, 2014 Daniel Lee Barclays, a fairly well known bank you might say. Well, considering they’re one of the biggest banks in the UK, if you don’t know them then you really should.
If you’re a football fan, you should know that they sponsor the Premier League and so on and so forth.
Well, amidst a number of recent bad times for the major banks in Britain, things aren’t looking any better for staff at one Barclays branch in Cardiff. There is around 100 staff who work at the branch in Callaghan Square, in the central business district of the city, which deals with a number of different complaints including PPI complaints.
There are a number of officials from the Unite union who have said that it was expected that a number of these posts would go.
Commenting on the matter, Barclays have said that it is too early to say how many people in these jobs would be made redundant but they have said that they will make every effort to redeploy the members of staff.
They have also mentioned that they hope 50% of the posts affected will be moved to a site at Windsor Court in Cardiff. The rest of the ones to be made redundant will hopefully be moved to sites in Northampton and Birmingham.
According to someone at the bank, they have started having discussions with PPI and Specialist Complaints colleagues at Callaghan Square about a proposed reorganisation of a section of their PPI and specialist complaints services function.
Giving this some thought, the bank would be right to grow the teams who deal with PPI complaints and the other specialist complaints teams as there’s set to be a rise in the number of complaints coming in for a variety of financial products that have been mis-sold.
Though you may be sick of hearing about PPI by now, you should know that there is still billions left to reclaim for those people out there who think that they may have been mis-sold payment protection insurance.
The next big scandal is looming too. Packaged bank accounts have been widely mis-sold in Britain and it is estimated that around 10 million people have these accounts. That accounts to about 1 in 5 customers in the UK being sold one of these accounts. On top of this, there are still millions of accounts out there that are no longer active that could be claimed on.
Packaged bank accounts are, if you’re blissfully unaware, a bank account that you may or may not know that you’re paying a small fee for every month. This small fee is because you’ll be receiving ‘benefits from the account.
These benefits can range from ‘free’ mobile phone insurance to ‘free’ breakdown cover. It depends entirely on the bank that you’re with and what they’re offering. The fees range from £10 a month up to £30 a month and if you’ve been paying this for a number of years, you could be entitled to a big payday.
There is set to be a rise in the amount of packaged bank account claims as they come to prominence and there’s more and more coverage in the news about them, too. There are some banks who are now suspending sales of these accounts and also there are an awful lot of complaints about the way that the claims are being handled.
If you think you may have been mis-sold a packaged bank account, why not get in touch with us and start your claim today!
Barclays Job Losses
March 26, 2015 Daniel Lee How on earth are banks and lenders continuing to get away with cheating it’s customers time after time after time?
The biggest mis-selling scandal ever to hit the UK has seen yet another twist to the story, following an investigation by the BBC.
The BBC investigation has uncovered evidence that suggests the banks and lenders who ripped us off in the first instance by mis-selling PPI to MILLIONS of customers, has been short changing us all again when it comes to paying out fair levels of compensation.
The latest twist to a frankly disgusting episode in the history of the banking sector may come as a surprise to some, but to those who deal with banks and their tactics on a daily basis, it certainly comes as no surprise to us.
I’ve spoken previously regarding the inadequate measures and fines handed out by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and it appears this most recent behaviour by the banks would not have been uncovered had it not been for the BBC. It appears that the FCA are more than inadequate, they may be incompetent too.
It should go without saying that huge fines should be handed out for yet another example of cheating by the banks, but don’t hold your breath, it simply won’t happen.
In fact, the head of the FCA Martin Wheatley has gone so far as to suggest that instances such as this were likely to happen, given the number of complaints the banks are dealing with.
Well Mr Wheatley, YOU ARE WRONG. The banks have put themselves into this mess, and it’s time they put things right, no matter how much it costs and how long it takes. NO “issues”, as you like to put it, are acceptable.
As previously pointed out, with the frankly pitiful fines handed out to banks versus the gigantic profits on offer by scamming, cheating and frankly thieving from it’s customers, it is easy to see why the banks continue to choose to dance on the dark side.
Following the BBC investigation which inevitably prompted the FCA to take a closer look at firms, as many as 2.5 MILLION complaints are due to be re-opened, which could lead to a further £1 BILLION in PPI compensation having to be paid out to customers who have been short-changed, or worse still had their complaint unfairly rejected.
With the PPI compensation bill currently standing at over £23 BILLION, I predicted long ago that the banks estimate of a final bill of £25 BILLION was reliant upon their continued tactics going unpunished and the near 7 MILLION who have yet to make a claim not coming forward.
Your Money Claim are industry experts in recovering compensation for mis-sold Payment Protection Insurance, and mis-sold Packaged Bank Accounts. Whether you know your accounts or not, Your Money Claim’s fast-track system can find your account details and check to see whether you’ve been sold PPI.
Your Money Claim will work on your behalf, fighting your corner at every step of the process.
With MILLIONS already recovered for it’s customers, Your Money Claim knows the banks tactics, and knows how to beat them.
Make sure your case receives the professional attention it needs. Start your claim today.
PPI Compensation
August 29, 2014 Daniel Lee You may have seen recently that RBS have been fined almost £15 million for “serious failings” in the mortgage advice that they have been giving out to their customers.
That’s all well and good that they’ve been fined by the regulator for their diabolical showing when it comes to their customers’ best interests, but what does this mean for you, the general public?
We’ve decided to take a bit of a deeper look into the amount of people that have been affected by this, how you can find out if you’re one of the ones that has been affected, what the advisers were doing wrong, if you could be entitled to receive compensation and whether or not you should be concerned about having taken a mortgage out from either RBS or NatWest recently.
From June 1st 2011 to March 2013, both RBS and NatWest sold a combined 177,000 mortgages to their customers. Of these almost 200,000 mortgages, 30,000 were advised sales and it is these customers that are the ones that will have been affected.
The sales of 164 mortgages that were made during this time period were reviewed by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and they found that only two of those customers were given the correct advice.
They did however, in their report, conclude that every one of the 30,000 customers who were sold a mortgage on an advised basis in that time period is almost certainly “at risk of not having received suitable advice”.
You may have been given the advice over the telephone or face to face, either way, you may have still been given the wrong advice. According to research, 87% of the affected sales were made in a branch.
If this was you, you should expect to receive a letter from either RBS or NatWest that will invite you to bring up and talk to them about any concerns you may have about the way that the mortgage was sold to you.
If you don’t receive a letter, or any correspondence from the banks, you can call the bank on 0800 678 1924 or you could even write to them at: Mortgage Case Handling Team, Mortgage Services, PO Box 12201, Birmingham, B2 2NA.
Whether they were sitting down and going through the advice face to face with you, or if they were doing it over the phone, there was a lot of things that the advisers were failing to do.
One thing that advisers were required to do in order to perform a proper check was an affordability test. During these ‘tests’ instead of asking detailed questions, advisers were assessing outgoings using ONS stats on average household expenditure as well as information on the customer’s loan and their credit card borrowing.
The advisers were failing to check other things properly though, such as the customer’s budgets. This meant that things like travel and child care, that would have more than likely been missed, could have affected their ability to borrow.
One thing that it was found that a lot of the sales advisers were doing is giving out their own predictions on base rate movements and advising on products based on their not-so-accurate predictions. One adviser was even recorded as saying: “If we don’t increase rates with this double-dip recession, the economy is in dire straits. Rates will rise. If you take a two-year deal then rates will be higher after this period.”
According to the FCA report, one of the major causes of the majority of these problems was the bank’s IT systems. The systems used by the banks did not allow the advisers to properly record the results of the all-important “fact find”.
This is the process that is needed to be carried out by ALL mortgage lenders in order for them to properly determine the suitability and affordability of all of their products. One of the major flaws in the system that was being used at the time is that is used a text box that restricted the answers that could be given to a total of 500 characters.
The FCA has, as we’re all aware, fined the bank close to £15 million, but they have stopped short of insisting that the bank must compensate their customers.
The reasoning behind this is down to the fact that, overall, while sales processes were almost all non-compliant, there was no extensive consumer detriment that has been discovered in their reviewing of the cases.
That doesn’t mean to say that there were no cases found as there were in fact five of these cases found. The fact that five of these cases were found, meant that these were cases where there had been improper advice given or the customer had received an unfair outcome.
The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has recommended that anyone who is concerned about a mortgage sold to them on an advised basis during the period mentioned above should contact the banks using the details we provided above.
Since March 2013, the bank is insistent that things have improved and chief executive, Ross McEwan has come out and said that the bank has been working hard on ensuring things were put right.
Speaking about the overhauling of the processes that were already in place when he joined the bank, Mr McEwan said: “When I joined the bank we completely overhauled our processes, and took all our mortgage advisers off the front line for an extensive period of time to get the training required,”
A promise like this will undoubtedly make any homeowners wary. Regardless of the fact that the FCA (formerly FSA) made the banks more than aware that they were concerned about their sales processes going as far back as 2011, both RBS and NatWest failed to take any action until late 2012.
It was between then and March 2013 that the banks started to, in dribs and drabs, pull their whole sales force and set about getting them retrained.
This scandal certainly had very little effect on the banks and it certainly didn’t stop them from going ahead with their mortgage sales and in the summer of last year, they made an announcement that they would be increasing their mortgage market share with a number of different things taking place including recruiting new mortgage advisers.
RBS Mortgage Fine
