Financial services companies are still not dealing with customer complaints properly. Just look at the figures for complaints about financial services. The majority of those brought to the Financial Ombudsman decided in favour of the customer in the second half of 2013.
Okay, so banks have allocated more than £20 billion to compensate the victims for the outrageous mis-selling of payment protection insurance, but customers are still having to exhaust the banks’ own complaints procedure before they can take their complaints to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS).
Talk about making us jump through hoops!
Financial services complaints
Over the full year 576,000 people made complaints to the FOS – an increase of 38%. In the last six months of 2013 Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, RBS and HSBC were most complained about.
Falling but still not good enough
The number of complaints about payment protection insurance is finally falling but separate information from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published yesterday showed that about 10% of firms higher-risk incentive schemes were still being operated without being managed properly.
This leaves customers at risk of being sold inappropriate products because the sales people earn bonuses or other rewards for hitting sales targets.
The FCA wants banks to do more to monitor poor behaviour in sales conversations and to ensure staff who stand to gain by sales do not give personal recommendations. There is still a long way to go and customers have to be vigilant and to report any wrong-doing.
Remember:
- Money Fight Club members do their research and then seek out the products they want to buy.
- They do not allow themselves to be bamboozled by sales patter when they just want do transact some simple bit of banking business.
- They check their bank statements and other financial statements every month to make sure there are no payments that should not be there.