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Are you certain you aren’t still owed money for mis-sold PPI?

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PPI claim
Profile photo of Lauren Deitz Lauren Deitz Conversation Editor
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Both Barclays and Lloyds have announced that they’ve set aside a further £700m for paying out for mis-sold PPI claims. So are you sure you aren’t still owed money for mis-sold PPI?

By now you’re probably sick of hearing about Payment Protection Insurance (PPI). In fact, you may think that pretty much everyone who ever had one of these products sold to them with a loan has claimed back their loss.

But with the likes of Barclays and Lloyds ring-fencing a further £700m for this financial year to deal with PPI claims, it’s clear that there’s still a lot of people out there who haven’t claimed back their mis-sold PPI.

Claiming for PPI

Recently, we delved into the PPI claiming process and found that one in three people who’ve had a relevant financial product thought it would be very difficult to check if they had been sold PPI in the first place. It seems that those who may have grounds to claim are put off by the prospect of complicated and lengthy paperwork.

We also found that more people thought it would be easier to claim PPI compensation through a claims-management company (CMC) than directly from their bank.

But the claims process can be easier than you think.

Because we want everyone who was mis-sold a PPI policy to be compensated, we’ve created a new free tool to simplify the process. It also means that you keep 100% of the compensation instead of sharing up to a third of it with a CMC!

Our tool has already helped people to claim nearly £500,000 in PPI compensation. The average payout for successful claimants using our tool is £5,371, and the largest single payout was £50,006.94, which was initially refused by Santander but overturned by the Financial Ombudsman Service.

The major banks and building societies now signed up to our tool include Barclays, Santander, HSBC (M&S Bank, First Direct, John Lewis, HSBC), RBS (Natwest, Ulster Bank), Lloyds Banking Group (Halifax, Bank of Scotland) and Nationwide. We’re calling on all banks to sign up to our tool and for the regulator to make these free-to-use tools a more central part of its communications campaign.

PPI deadline

Time is seriously running out. There are two years left on the clock to get your claim in after the Financial Conduct Authority announced a deadline of 29 August 2019. The banks have already paid out vast sums of money, but there are still substantial sums set aside for outstanding claims.

Also, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling in Plevin vs Paragon Personal Finance Ltd, if you’ve previously had a claim rejected then you could put a new complaint in for undisclosed high commission.

Have you claimed for mis-sold PPI? Did you claim yourself or did you get a CMC to do it for you? How did you find the process?

Comments
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Guest
bishbut says:
29 July 2017

I am so fed up of the whole PPI thing which as gone for far too long that even if I thought I might possibly be I now cannot care less If people have not done anything by now inspite of all the maximum publicity they do not deserve to be able to claim at all

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John Ward says:
30 July 2017

I find it absolutely incredible that the compensation for miss-sold PPI policies is forecast to be of the order of £27,000,000,000 [twenty-seven billion pounds]. Just think about it for a moment. That’s over £1,000 for every household in the country. If half never had such a policy that makes it £2,000 for every one that did. Can that be right? Surely not all policies were miss-sold. The compensation consists of policy premiums refunded and interest to the date of refund.

The problem is that the banks were unable prove that the policies were not miss-sold, which is the test. Unfortunately the banks’ records are so deficient on these points that they have become completely exposed to the compensation claims. A policy was miss-sold if the bank or other lender did not undertake a proper fact-find, or if they did not exercise due diligence in issuing a policy, or just set up the policy without express consent. What, never? Every bank? This must be one of the worst cases of gross corporate incompetence ever and has cost all customers dear through unnecessarily high charges as the banks have still made huge profits. The impact of this appalling mismanagement and negligence doesn’t seem to have hit share prices or directors’ remuneration especially. Another disgusting aspect is that a sizeable chunk of any compensation awarded has been captured by the parasitic claims management companies – needlessly so since the banks could have made it much clearer that customers could easily claim directly and they could even have said that they would not entertain any claims routed through a claims company. There is also the cost of the work undertaken by the Financial Ombudsman service, the Financial Conduct Authority and previous regulators in dealing with appeals and policy issues – I would hope those costs have been charged to the banks involved and is included in the £27 bn.

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DerekP says:
30 July 2017

I looked into a mis-sold-PPI claim for a friend a few years ago. She should have been entitled to about £300, from the basis of refunding charges made (plus interest?) when PPI had been imposed by default on a credit card account. From the hype, she had been hoping for much more…

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alfa says:
30 July 2017

I reported before that we could claim back CCP under this scheme and the company even notified us and sent us the claim forms without us asking for them.

We took out Credit Card Protection about 20 years ago when we were doing rather a lot of travelling. It cost £20-£30 a year and the idea was if we lost a purse or wallet, one call would cancel the cards and sort us out emergency money. Luckily we never had to use it.

But taking out CCP was our choice, and to claim it back would be wrong.

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John Ward says:
30 July 2017

I think you were right not to claim a refund, Alfa, since you had the protection even if you didn’t need to make a claim under the CCP arrangement. Unfortunately, many people have not been so scrupulous and the claims management companies [many of which were set up by law firms] have been pushing millions of unjustified claims knowing that the banks were not in a position defeat them. That might not have been illegal but in my view it was immoral and unethical.

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Ian says:
30 July 2017

I have to say your integrity is quite exceptional, Alfa.

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alfa says:
30 July 2017

I am getting a bit sick of the desperation of the claims companies now. They now say I wouldn’t know if I had been charged as the fees would have been hidden.

They now want you to give them all your credit card details to check out. I wonder how many of them are even genuine?

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John Ward says:
30 July 2017

Another despicable aspect of this sorry saga has been that nearly all the claims have been generated as a result of cold-calling where the claims company had no actual knowledge of a possible miss-selling but was just speculating. If they could inveigle the called party to allow them to do a search they were fairly sure they would strike gold somewhere.

I have never had a PPI policy but I am fairly sure if I had let one of the cold-callers have their way they would have turned something up and let me keep seventy per cent of it.

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alfa says:
30 July 2017

Thank you Ian but it probably depends on the circumstances.