The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has created new rules
that are aimed at helping all consumers who were mis-sold Payment
Protection Insurance (PPI) policies. Banks are required by these
rules to contact all past and existing consumers who may have been
at risk from PPI mis-selling in order to provide information about
how they begin making a claim.
All representatives of major financial businesses that have sold
PPI to consumers at any point in the past should be in discussion
with the FSA over how the new regulations should be implemented.
Once the FSA has agreed on a method of the retrospective review,
every PPI business will need to start analysing its past PPI sales
in order to discover if there are specific groups of consumers who
are likely to have been the victims of PPI mis-selling and write to
them to invite them to make a claim.
If you receive a letter from your PPI provider that suggests you
have been identified as being at risk from mis-sold PPI you should
start your claim process as soon as possible as the fact you have
been contacted by the bank probably means that you have a very
strong case. However, it should be noted that if you do not receive
a letter from the bank you still may have the chance to make a
claim. The reason you should continue with your claim even if you
do not receive a letter is because the PPI mis-selling scandal is
likely to cost the banks billions of pounds, these institutions
will therefore try as hard as they can to reduce the number of
people they have to pay compensation to.
It is extremely likely that financial services providers will
try to impose tough restrictions when deciding whether to alert
consumers to the possibility of a mis-selling claim. We can see
that this has already occurred with some of the major banks
indicating that if they have already rejected a mis-selling
complaint by a consumer, they will not consider that consumer's
case under the new rules.
Any consumers that have a PPI Policy or have ever had such a
policy in the past are advised to be seek compensation if they
strongly believe that their policy was mis-sold to them. There are
time limits on making a claim for mis-sold PPI which are enforced
by the Financial Ombudsman Service, a body that is responsible for
adjudicating disputes between consumers and the financial services
providers. If for some reason you fail to make a claim within these
time limits, you will lose your right to compensation. Because of
the large amounts of PPI policies involved, the big financial
services providers are likely to require many months, if not years,
to fully complete the retrospective review and many consumers who
wait for their PPI provider's permission before making a claim are
at a very high risk of running out of the legal time limits.
Comments (0)