PPI
Banks have been putting it
about in the media that most people have now claimed their PPI refunds.
Financial experts think this is the banks way of telling customers “Come on, it
time to put this all behind us and move on”.
Despite the banking world
saying this the HSBC Group have put aside a further £95m into the mis-selling
pot. It’s thought that this might just be enough to repay Nigella Lawson over
the PPI she had on the HSBC credit card she spent £100.000 on every month for
ten years. On that very subject it’s been alleged in the court at the fraud
trial of her two former assistants/personal shoppers that Miss Lawson has a
class A drug habit. As yet no word from Nigella who might claim that it’s a
misunderstanding. Yes she did allegedly say I love Charlie, but the Charlie she loves is her
husband Charlie Satchi. Not anymore obviously as they are now divorced after he
took her for a slap up meal.
In total HSBC which includes
First Direct and M&S Bank have put aside £1.8b. How busy were HSBC and its
cohorts, they must have been stitching up customer during normal office hours,
and in the evening and at double on Saturdays and at treble times on Sundays.
Even though HSBC admits
mis-selling PPI the Financial Ombudsman Service in September showed that HSBC wrongly dismissed or didn’t pay adequate redress
in 37% of the claims in the first six months of the year.
Seems they hoped that the 37%
of people they wrongly dismissed or didn’t adequately redress would simply accept
the banks “Dear Sir/Madam, you are due nothing, or £10, so come on let’s put
this all behind us and move on, Love HSBC” letter.
But the 37% of people didn’t accept
this and they wrote to the FOS saying “Dear Sir/Madam, HSBC thinks I’m stupid”.
However HSBC aren’t the worst.
Of the top 10 of most complained about financial firms Lloyds TSB and Bank of
Scotland, both part of Lloyds Banking Group were number one and number two.
Lloyds TSB wrongly rejected 86% of claims while Bank of Scotland wrongly
rejected 80%. The FOS found that the 14% and 20% respectively of claims those
banks paid out were the direct result of the claimant visiting them with a
baseball bat and an angry look on their face.
Therefore both Lloyds TSB and
BOS have adopted the HSBC “hope they
give up” ethos but they’ve taken it to the extreme.
And the situation seems to be
getting worse for PPI claimants as the Ombudsman dealt with a 327,035 cases
from January until June this year, up 15% on the previous six months. As the
Ombudsman is indeed an ombudsman singular, the poor man’s workload has him
exhausted.
90% of the complaints made against Lloyds TSB
to the ombudsman were upheld proving that they were indeed stalling and had
naughty sneaky monkeys dealing with the claims.
Lloyds TSB’s claims department
apparently works on a similar principle to the theory that if you have an
infinite amount of monkeys and an infinite amount of typewriters and an
infinite amount of time, eventually the monkeys will type out the entire works
of Shakespeare. Lloyds TSB appear to have an infinite amount of monkeys and an infinite
amount of claims and given that they also appear to have an infinite amount of
time, eventually they will wrongly dismiss all claims.
This is where Consumer Kings
comes in; we don’t accept being fobbed off by the banana chompers. So claim with
us.
You would have thought that
the banks would be trying to rebuild trust and you could say that at least RBS
are trying harder than most. They have upheld 68% of PPI claims. That could be
that the bank wants to get most of their PPI cases with an average pay out of
£1,736 out of the way to retrain the staff who work in their redress department
to deal with claims from their small business customers who had their
businesses closed down and their assets stolen by RBS. I say deal with, I do of course mean reject
because £1,736 will be chicken feed compared to what the average pay out will
be from the “they destroyed my life” claimants.
RBS which is state owned have
just announced losses of £634m for the last quarter. And here’s the funny
thing. RBS announced they are creating an internal “bad bank” to deal with the
£38b of problem loans. A bad bank?, everyone thought RBS was the bad bank.
Perhaps RBS should have announced that they were setting up an internal “much
worse bank”.
So are the PPI claims winding
down?. The banks say yes but they then contradict themselves by putting further
millions aside. £750m as in the case of Lloyds TSB.
Therefore there is a lot of money
just waiting to be claimed.
www.consumerkings.co.uk
