AIMS Review

FOS increases staff by 25% after PPI claims surge

FOS

The Financial Ombudsman Service has increased its staff numbers by 25 per cent over the last year under the weight of payment protection insurance misselling with plans to keep hiring if complaints continue at current levels.

In the last year it has recruited 500 more staff to deal exclusively with PPI claims, bringing its total workforce to 2,500.

A FOS spokeswoman says: “If we continue to receive PPI claims at the same volume we are seeing then it is not unrealistic that at the some point in the next year we can upsize again.

In its ombudsman news, FOS chief executive Natalie Ceeney says it has “scaled up significantly” to keep pace with demand.

She says: “We’ve now received half a million complaints in total about PPI – and so far this year we’ve handled double the number of cases that we had geared up to receive, following public consultation last year.

“Whatever happens, clearly PPI – on top of a growing caseload in other areas – will present us with some major challenges for some time to come.”

Ceeney adds: “We deal with many cases which should already have been sorted out by financial businesses. It is therefore disappointing that we have had to expand so significantly – and our growth is itself an illustration of some of the problems in the industry.”

CBI boss John Cridland calls for PPI payouts deadline
A business leader has called for a line to be drawn under the response to the mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI).

John Cridland, the director general of the CBI, said that a deadline should be set for the end of legal claims for compensation.

PPI was widely mis-sold to applicants for loans, credit cards or mortgages.

Generally, these customers have six years from the moment they were mis-sold the insurance to make a claim.

Or customers can still make a claim during the three years after they became aware that they might have a case, even if the sale was more than six years ago.

However, writing in The Times newspaper, Mr Cridland said that the level of publicity about PPI mis-selling meant that everyone who might have been mis-sold PPI would now be aware they could make a claim.

"I firmly believe we now need to draw a line under PPI," he wrote.

"Such a move could be reinforced by the Financial Services Authority declaring that the point at which consumer awareness of PPI mis-selling is widely known has now legally been reached."

Aimsreview http://www.aimsreview.com/prd-reclaim.html, Aimsreview can help assist with your PPI Claim. Aimsreview has helped thousands of customers in the uk with PPI c...