What is payment protection insurance?
PPI or Payment Protection Insurance is a type of insurance that covers the holder against falling ill, suffering an accident or being made unemployed and so unable to meet the repayments on a form of personal finance. The policy would cover the repayments on behalf of the policy holder for the period they are unable to work, or up to 12 months.
Problems started when criticism was mounted against the lenders who sold PPI, because many customers were unable to utilise the policy if and when needed.
Investigations by governing bodies followed and the FSA levied fines on the worst offenders.
A lack of product knowledge, inadequate training and internal sales pressures were blamed for the mass mis-selling of the controversial policy.
It turned out that millions of policies were sold to customers who didn’t want, need or ask for it. Many people didn’t know what PPI was, let alone that they had been paying for it for many years.
Now, lenders have been ordered to refund all those people who they ripped off over the past decade or more and if you are one of the estimated 20 million people in the UK who hold a PPI policy, you could be owed an average of £3000. Claims over £100,000 are not very rare.
Do I have PPI?
If you have had one or more credit cards, loans, mortgages and other forms of personal finance including car finance, store cards and the like prior to 2011 there is every chance that you have PPI attached. Even if you think you would have rejected it or that you would have noticed, banks and lenders tried to hide it within interest and fine print that many customers just accepted because they needed the finance at the time.
Many more people know they have PPI but they were told in the meeting with the bank that it was compulsory or that having it would benefit their application, this is not true and if this happened to you, you were mis-sold.
Finding out if you are one of the 20 million people in the UK who has been ripped off and has PPI on one or more of their accounts is not too hard. You have a couple of options, either you can check yourself by closely looking over policy documents, bank and credit statements or original loan policy details for mention of ANY added insurance.
PPI was ‘dressed’ up and given many names by lenders in an attempt to hide it within applications. If there are ANY mentions of additional ‘insurance’, ‘cover’ or ‘protection’ this is probably payment protection insurance.
The second option is to talk to a claims company like ourselves, we work closely with our customers and identify more claims and get more compensation per customer than many of the other claims companies out there. We do this because we only take on cases that we are confident will win, lenders respect this as they are receiving millions of bogus PPI claims from dodgy firms taking a ‘punt’.
Checking and claiming yourself is free, it will cost you the time, some printer ink and a few stamps but that is essentially it. Using a claims firm like us will cost you 20% + VAT, but this is completely no win no fee so you don’t have anything to lose.
Many people ask us why they should use us rather than do it themselves and we believe the answer to be three-fold:
- We get more money back per customer than the majority, the industry average is £2750 per customer, we get nearly £4000 PER CLAIM, so if you have 3 claims this can easily add up.
- We tend to uncover claims that customers didn’t know about, so if you were to use us there is every chance that we could uncover other claims that you would not have made without our help, obviously this will get you a lot more compensation.
- Banks are defending PPI claims more vigorously in 2012, the majority of claims are rejected initially and a ‘normal’ consumer would either give up on the case or not know what to do to continue chasing the claim for compensation. Facts show that up to 98% of cases that are initially rejected by lenders are later compensated. We know what it takes to win compensation, our involvement could be the difference between winning and losing.
How do I find out if I have PPI?
If you do decide to go it alone and chase your compensation yourself the first thing to do is to check over your statements, look at your policy documents and see if you can identify mentions of additional insurance on their. This could be labelled as a number of things but in most cases an additional insurance charge on a monthly credit card bill, as part of your monthly loan repayments or as a total extra charge on top of your initial upfront charges.
If you opt to go down the route of using a claims firm the best route is to give one of our expert advisors a call, they will be more than happy to give you some advice and guide you through what it takes to claim back your compensation. We can act on your behalf and take all the hassle away from you, all you have to do is answer a few questions, sign a form or two and sit back and wait for our call with the good news (hopefully).
Typically a PPI claim will take from 4-16 weeks to be resolved, it is very rare that a bank will pay out in 4 weeks but it does happen. In most cases you should expect to receive an offer on your claim, if valid, within 8 weeks of starting it. Once excepted, the lender typically pays out fairly quickly but they do have 28 days to do this legally.
In most cases the lender will pay you out in to a live account if you have one with them currently, if not they will write you a cheque. Remember though that if you have a live account that is in arrears with the lender they may write off some or all of that debt as part/full payment. So for example, you have a loan outstanding with Lloyds TSB of £2000 and your PPI reclaim means you are compensated £10,000, Lloyds will (in most cases) write off the amount you owe on the loan and pay you the rest into the same account or by cheque, your compensation will be £9000.
What should I do about it?
You must act now, 90% of the population know about PPI but only 10% have acted on it and there an estimated 28 million PPI policies that still lie, unclaimed in the UK. This could very easily be you, for £3000 its worth checking, isn’t it?
Pick up the phone, give us a call an we can guide you through the process. If you don’t want to go through the process with us, that is totally fine, we just want to make sure that everyone out there is getting the money back that is rightfully theirs.
There may be a time-frame on your claim, some banks have identified customers who are owed compensation and sent out leaflets saying they have 3 years to claim. Of course, like everyone else who gets a leaflet through the post, you throw it out not knowing this is essentially an admittance.
Banks have been fined for mis-selling PPI and have been found guilty in the High Court, claiming is your right, its your money and now is the time to get it back.