PPI stands for ‘Payment Protection Insurance’. It’s designed to cover your loan or credit card repayments for a year in the event of an accident, sickness or unemployment, or sometimes just accident and sickness.
Yet it’s been widely mis-sold, and you could even have it without knowing. If you were mis-sold PPI, you may be able to reclaim £1,000s.
For more in depth information on the topic, visit the what is PPI page.
No. Payment Protection Insurance itself isn’t a bad product. But it’s been widely mis-sold with thousands of loans, leaving many paying hundreds for potentially worthless cover.
The insurance cost often dwarfs the interest, so many believe it’s the most overpriced financial product around. Sales staff were hugely incentivised to sell PPI whenever possible. Many were under so much pressure, they strayed far from the truth.
If you’ve got PPI, ask if you really need it. If you’ve a bank loan with PPI, you should be allowed to cancel the insurance. If you need PPI, getting a standalone policy and cancelling the existing one should save cash, as less will go towards big commissions.
What Products Could I Have Had PPI On?
Payment Protection Insurance was most commonly sold on loans and credit cards.
However, if you had a mortgage, secured loan, car finance plan from a dealership, store cards, catalogue credit, monthly-paid insurance or even an overdraft (though we’ve only heard of Barclays doing this) then check to see if you had PPI.
Sales staff dressed as advisers were hugely incentivised to sell PPI whenever possible. Many were under so much pressure they strayed far from the truth, and much of the insurance cost went on huge commissions. The sellers were often trusted financial institutions, so sadly, many were left with mis-sold PPI.
There’s no specific start date – the problems of mis-selling have been around for a long time. Claims can generally start on policies from the 1990s (possibly earlier). The financial regulator started fining PPI companies in 2006, but a big improvement wasn’t seen until 2011.
No, you can complain about a product sold at any time, though here are some guidelines which may help. It’s easier if your insurance was active in the last six years, but don’t let this put you off.
Update: The FCA who regulates the industry has recently announced plans for a deadline for PPI claims. The date it set is 29th August 2019. This means you will have to claim your mis sold PPI before then in order to receive it. Any claims made after this date will no longer be valid.
Insurance started in the last six years: There’s no issue here at all. Even if the loan’s now paid off, you can start a reclaim.
Older insurance that’s still active, or ended within the last six years: You can start a reclaim. The six-year rule applies to active insurance, so a policy taken out 12 years ago but paid off five years ago was still active within the key six year period.
If your policy ended over six years ago: The ‘statue of limitations’ means banks don’t need to keep records that are over six years old. However, there is no official cut-off time so if you’ve still got the paperwork, while your chances of success are a little lower with older loans, many still do successfully reclaim.
Potentially, big money. Generally, the amount you pay for loan PPI is about 15% of your balance, but it could be up to 30%. It doesn’t sound much, but it quickly mounts up.
To find out if you have had PPI attached to any of your finances you can do the following:
The products you should check for PPI include:
Personal loans, Credit cards, Business Loans, Business Credit Cards, Mortgages, Secured loans, Dealership car finance, Overdraft (occasionally), and many more…..
If you can not find your old agreements you could try contacting the lender or broker who arranged your finance or credit for you. They only have to keep your records for 6 years after you last used the account.
If it is more than 6 years since your account closed then the institution that sold the policy to you is no longer required to keep any paperwork. You are still perfectly entitled to make a claim, but you will have to provide any and all evidence on your own to claim.
If the above proves difficult you could check your credit report. The UK has 3 main credit agencies that will list any credit and debt that you have had within the last 6 years. The 3 agencies are called Equifax, Experian, and Call Credit. You can either get a free trial or you can see your credit file for a one-off £2 fee.
If the above is too time consuming for you or seems a little difficult and you can’t be bothered with all the hassle, you could use our Free PPI Check service and let us do all the work for you.
If you already know that you have PPI and you think that it was mis-sold, contact us and we will discuss this with you and determine whether we think you may have a claim or not.
Common reasons for the mis-selling of PPI are below:
Contact us and we will assist you all the way throughout the process; from establishing whether you have had PPI, making a claim to the relevant lenders or companies on your behalf, helping you fill out any relevant paperwork, right through to agreeing, assessing and settling any offers of compensation on your behalf.
Where you do not know whether you have had PPI or are unsure we can assist you by running a Free PPI Check on your behalf. This PPI check is done for free and we will contact your lenders and any other relevant companies and check with them if any PPI was actually taken out or put in place at any stage of you being their customer.
Why not try our Free PPI Check and let us find out if you have PPI!
PPI was widely mis sold to customers either at the point of sale or at some point thereafter. All the benefits would have been explained but eligibility or appropriateness may not have been determined. Here is a list of the most common situations when PPI may have been mis sold:
You can directly contact your lender or the company that you think may be responsible for mis-selling you PPI yourself and make a complaint to them, letting them know of your concerns and informing them of why you think that you may have been mis-sold the PPI.
Alternatively you can use a Claims Management Company such as ourselves to help you with bringing a PPI claim. The benefits of using us is that we can take care of the entire process of making a claim for you, including taking your claim to the Financial Ombudsman Service or Financial Services Compensation Scheme if necessary.
Before submitting a claim for mis-sold PPI to a lender or any other company who you think may be responsible for mis-selling you PPI, you would first need to establish if PPI has been added. We can help with this by helping you check your old banking statements, your credit report, we can even write to your lenders or the company that you think may be responsible for mis-selling you PPI and ask them to run a Subject Access Request (SAR) or Pre- Submission check. These checks will determine whether you have had PPI or not and can save a lot of time and wasted resources for all parties concerned.
By running the SAR and Pre- Submission checks before a letter of complaint is sent out to the lender or company we can ensure that complaints are sent to lenders and companies where PPI has actually existed.
Of course you are entirely free to contact the lenders and companies who you feel may have mis-sold you PPI yourself, and there is no legal obligation for you to use a claims management company such as ourselves.
The choice is yours!
For more information, go to our How to Claim PPI page.
To make a PPI claim you will need to know the company that you have taken out the finance with and prove that you had PPI attached to the finance that you want to claim for mis-sold PPI on.
We can help with this by helping you to establish whether or not PPI was actually attached to that particular finance. We would then establish if the PPI was actually mis-sold and on what grounds.
The next step would be for us to contact the company that you think is responsible and inform them of your complaint.
Our Free PPI Check can help with this!
In normal circumstances you would have up to 6 years from the time that your account that had the PPI on was still active and no more than 3 years since you knew there was a problem.
However if you have paperwork that shows evidence of PPI and you feel that you may have been mis-sold that PPI, then there is no reason that you can not put in a complaint and ask for a refund of any PPI premiums paid along with any interest paid and 8% statutory interest that would be awarded to you buy a court if your claim was successful.
There is no reason that you could not successfully be compensated for mis-sold PPI going back 10 – 15 years provided that we were able to establish that PPI was added and that the PPI was mis-sold.
Although it is normally best to have proof of any PPI by way of bank statements, credit card agreements etc, that show that PPI was added, it is not always needed as we can run a Free PPI Check for you. You don’t need account numbers or any statements, as long as you can remember the name of the lenders then we can do the rest.
For more information, go to our How Far Back Can I Claim PPI page
Our Free PPI Check is exactly that what it is labelled as. We will basically contact any lenders or companies that you are or have been a customer with and taken finances with in the past and we will run a free PPI Check on your behalf to see whether PPI has been attached to any of the finances that you have taken out with them.
It really is that simple. All that we require is that you must have been a customer of the lender or company in the past and you must be able to remember the lender or company names. We will do the rest.
Obviously we can not just contact random companies without a valid reason, this would be pointless and waste a lot of peoples time and money. We therefore would ask that you do cooperate with us efficiently and only ask us to contact lenders or companies that you can genuinely remember being a customer of and taking finances through.
Additionally we would like to point out that if PPI were to be found on any of your accounts once a Free PPI Check was run, we could only run a mis-sold PPI claim on accounts where you felt that there were genuine reasons for being mis-sold the PPI.
The Free PPI Check Process:
We never charge for the Free PPI Check whatsoever. We only charge our fees on successful completion of any mis-sold PPI claims that we submit as a result of you asking us to proceed with a Mis-sold PPI claim once PPI has been found through our Free PPI Check.
Our Free PPI Check is completely FREE.
We only charge you any fees once we have found PPI and you have instructed us to make a complaint about mis-sold PPI on your behalf, and this complaint has been upheld.
You are not under any obligation to instruct us to make a complaint for mis-sold PPI as a result of us finding PPI once our Free PPI Check is complete. However if you do decide to instruct us to make a complaint on your behalf once the Free PPI Check is complete our fees will be due on any successful mis-sold PPI claims that we submit and win on your behalf.
Our fees are 20% on any successful claims. For example: If we won you £4,000 compensation, we would charge you £800 in total as our fees are: £800 (20% of £4,000).