HTML Preview Professional Business Complaint Letter page number 1.
letter to financial services businesses
with significant numbers of complaints
referred to the ombudsman about PPI
April 2009
Dear financial services practitioner
complaints about payment protection insurance (PPI)
I am writing to you and other financial services businesses in view of the volume of
PPI complaints being referred to the ombudsman service about your business by
your customers and their representatives.
The purpose of this letter is to update you about the progress the Financial
Ombudsman Service is making in dealing with these cases, and to ask for your help in
ensuring that cases referred to us can be handled fairly and as efficiently as possible.
This might require changes in your present approach to handling these complaints.
Complaints about PPI now account for around a quarter of the record number of
cases being referred to the ombudsman service. As you may know, we have asked
the FSA to consider whether it should use its powers to intervene in these cases.
In the meantime, we are progressing PPI cases as quickly as possible. Our ability to
do this is dependent, in large part, on the actions of businesses such as yours – and
on the actions of the claims-management companies that provide us (and no doubt
you) with a significant proportion of the complaints on this topic.
We have now investigated and resolved large numbers of PPI complaints and we have
published further information about our approach to these cases on our website (at
www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/publications/technical_notes/ppi.html
). We have
also published more general advice about complaints and the ombudsman on our
online resource for businesses (www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/faq/index.htm
).
However, our progress has been slowed by the lack of adequate information in many
cases – and by the poor complaints-handling processes of some parties. So I am
asking you to review the way in which you handle complaints referred to the
ombudsman service, to help us both in the efficient handling of these disputes.