Just when we thought we had heard the last of the Payment Protection Insurance racket, the Financial Ombudsman Service reports that it is getting record setting 800 complaints a day, most of which are in regards to PPI claims.
Over the past few years, consumers have been filing for PPI refunds in light of being mis sold cover and most UK financial institutions are paying the price for it. The FOS reports that claims through June are up by as much as 54% over the period just prior and that there seems to be no end in sight to the complaints still coming in.
According to their records, PPI complaints total at least 66% of the total complaints they are receiving and more than half of those were against Britain’s largest banking groups. Some of those very banks are in financial trouble at the moment and it is further thought that much of that difficulty is primarily due to the amount of restitution they have been ordered to pay.
When banks filed an appeal with the courts, many claims had been laid aside on hold. Government upheld their earlier ruling and banks were then given a 31 August deadline to clear up their backlog of complaints. Some banks are past that deadline and in jeopardy of further penalties being imposed.
Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest showed the sharpest rise in complaints with 147,109 claims coming in during just the first half of this year set against 84,109 complaints which came in for the whole year of 2010. To date RBS, NatWest and other leading UK banks have had to refund hundreds of millions of pounds to customers who had been mis sol payment protection insurance. The rising number of complaints still coming in show that the problem is a long way from being resolved.
