Wednesday 1 August 2012

Is It Beneficial To Hire Claim Management Companies To Help You With PPI claims?

By Mike Ryan


Payment Protection Insurance is one of the biggest scams that ever happened in the financial industry. Since 1998 magazines and newspapers have been highlighting the mis-selling of PPI. In 2005 the Financial Service Authority took over the task of regulating the Insurance industry in UK and they demanded Britain's banks to correct the issue. Fines were imposed on banks and court hearings were held one after another to prove that PPI was mis-sold. It was only in April 2011 that the High Court in the UK finally ruled in favor of the victims of mis-sold insurance policy to make their PPI claims.

Customers need to be informed that once they make application for a PPI claims with their loan provider the reimbursement that they're expected to obtain should not merely comprise of the premiums that they have already settled but also the interest it acquired. To illustrate, a borrower that has fully paid out his loan should collect entirely the premium amount together with the statutory interest. Nonetheless, when there is still an outstanding balance that the borrower is paying out then the bank has the right to counterbalance the refund from the particular loan. If there must be any excess only then that the specific claimant will be compensated else it will go to the claim management company.

With the substantial influx of PPI claims received by the loan providers at present they are now discouraging customers to utilise claim management companies to process their claims. This may be a possibility as several of these companies are not actually authorized with the Ministry of Justice thus creating only fraud papers of borrowers that do not have PPI policy in the first place. Because of this, it will be prudent for claimants to ascertain first the company if they are sanctioned by the Ministry just before employing them.

The rule of conduct that the Ministry of Justice demands for claim management companies are for them not to do any cold calling or hard marketing to clients who wish to make a PPI claims. Further, they must give the consumer written data on how to create a claim and how much it will cost them if and when they hire the company. Lastly, a 14 day cooling period should be also given to the customer as soon as they opt to use the company just in case they change their mind.

Meanwhile, consumers can also prefer to make PPI claims themselves and submit their request for compensation to their lender as long as they have the necessary documents to back up their claims. On the other hand, can the consumer trust the lender to pay back with interest the amount due to them on the mis-sold insurance policy if they already have been cheated before by the same lender? This is the reason why consumers seek the help of claim management companies to help them with their claims. Anyways, if the Ministry of Justice gave these companies recognition to handle PPI claims then consumers can surely benefit from this.




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