Originally posted by di30
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http://www.walletpop.co.uk/2011/09/0...rs-to-resolve/
Banking complaints take two years to resolve.
It takes a lot for us to complain. We can endure years of terrible service, and suffer horrible financial penalties before we finally decide to fight for our rights. The trouble is that at this point, the long wait for redress has only just begun.
It can take two years to have a complaint resolved by the Financial Ombudsman Service. So what's going wrong?
The backlog
The problem is largely one of workload. The FOS has been swamped by a deluge of claims in the past few years relating to the sale of payment protection insurance (PPI) which was so widely mis-sold that it became the basis of a whole claims trend of its own. The subsequent ruling on PPI means those individual claims no longer have to be pursued as everyone will be investigated by the financial company concerned.
However, the backlog by this stage is enormous, and the cases keep coming. The workload has doubled in the last five years and there has been a 26% increase in the number of cases.
It doesn't help that the financial institutions are fighting their corner more vehemently than ever. This means that more and more cases have to be referred up to an ombudsman for a final decision, which is more time consuming and leads to longer delays.
Very urgent cases, involving real financial hardship, are pushed to the top of the list. Everyone else must wait anything up to two years before their complaint is ruled on.
So how did it all go so wrong?
You can blame the service. You could argue that the extra staff brought on during the PPI scandal were too few and too late - although it argues it couldn't bring anyone on faster because they couldn't be trained up any quicker without cutting corners.
However to blame the FOS would be to miss the bigger picture. It is brought in when two things have already gone horribly awry. It's the fact that the financial institutions are incapable of meeting two of their most important obligations that has brought us to this horrible situation in the first place.
The banking failures
The first is that the financial company has let the customer down The products are not up to scratch, the salespeople flogging it at the firm in question have done a bad job, the product fails to work as it is supposed to, and promises have been broken. None of these things are anything to be proud of. Each of them demonstrates that the sole purpose of a financial company is to make money, and customers are simply the way they achieve their goal. If the customer suffers in the process, then so be it.
The second factor is that once something goes wrong, the company in question fails to fairly and sensibly address the issue - or it does so with so little respect for the customer that they feel they need to turn to someone else for redress. This is a very sorry state of affairs. Clearly financial companies have lost touch with the fact that they are dealing with real people. They have forgotten that the dots on a graph are real individuals with serious questions about what the business has been up to with their money. They deserve respect and attention, and for someone to take them seriously.
It was the fact that financial institutions forgot they were dealing with real people and real money that got us into the financial crisis in the first place. The game took over and making money became the one and only aim.
If these figures are anything to go by, then they have learned nothing from the process. The number of complaints is a sign that all is still rotten among the banks, and the sooner something is done to shake them up from their relentless, callous, money grabbing the better.
Banking complaints take two years to resolve.
It takes a lot for us to complain. We can endure years of terrible service, and suffer horrible financial penalties before we finally decide to fight for our rights. The trouble is that at this point, the long wait for redress has only just begun.
It can take two years to have a complaint resolved by the Financial Ombudsman Service. So what's going wrong?
The backlog
The problem is largely one of workload. The FOS has been swamped by a deluge of claims in the past few years relating to the sale of payment protection insurance (PPI) which was so widely mis-sold that it became the basis of a whole claims trend of its own. The subsequent ruling on PPI means those individual claims no longer have to be pursued as everyone will be investigated by the financial company concerned.
However, the backlog by this stage is enormous, and the cases keep coming. The workload has doubled in the last five years and there has been a 26% increase in the number of cases.
It doesn't help that the financial institutions are fighting their corner more vehemently than ever. This means that more and more cases have to be referred up to an ombudsman for a final decision, which is more time consuming and leads to longer delays.
Very urgent cases, involving real financial hardship, are pushed to the top of the list. Everyone else must wait anything up to two years before their complaint is ruled on.
So how did it all go so wrong?
You can blame the service. You could argue that the extra staff brought on during the PPI scandal were too few and too late - although it argues it couldn't bring anyone on faster because they couldn't be trained up any quicker without cutting corners.
However to blame the FOS would be to miss the bigger picture. It is brought in when two things have already gone horribly awry. It's the fact that the financial institutions are incapable of meeting two of their most important obligations that has brought us to this horrible situation in the first place.
The banking failures
The first is that the financial company has let the customer down The products are not up to scratch, the salespeople flogging it at the firm in question have done a bad job, the product fails to work as it is supposed to, and promises have been broken. None of these things are anything to be proud of. Each of them demonstrates that the sole purpose of a financial company is to make money, and customers are simply the way they achieve their goal. If the customer suffers in the process, then so be it.
The second factor is that once something goes wrong, the company in question fails to fairly and sensibly address the issue - or it does so with so little respect for the customer that they feel they need to turn to someone else for redress. This is a very sorry state of affairs. Clearly financial companies have lost touch with the fact that they are dealing with real people. They have forgotten that the dots on a graph are real individuals with serious questions about what the business has been up to with their money. They deserve respect and attention, and for someone to take them seriously.
It was the fact that financial institutions forgot they were dealing with real people and real money that got us into the financial crisis in the first place. The game took over and making money became the one and only aim.
If these figures are anything to go by, then they have learned nothing from the process. The number of complaints is a sign that all is still rotten among the banks, and the sooner something is done to shake them up from their relentless, callous, money grabbing the better.
Good post Di,like the new avatar
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