Banks have paid out huge amounts in compensation for investment mis-selling in recent years, with complaints reaching a record high in 2013, but people are still largely unaware of the ways they can be mis-sold by their investment advisers.
When you think of an investor, you might think of a high-flying business person. You may imagine someone living in an urban environment, with a successful career, perhaps even a penthouse and a glamorous champagne lifestyle. These are the people, you might envisage, who are most likely to be mis-sold an investment product.
Investment products are big business for UK banks. Encouraging clients to place significant sums into structured investment products or funds is a winning formula for the bank’s financial liquidity. As a result, they are motivated to promote investment products as actively as possible.
According to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) back in 1988, “if a financial business provided a recommendation, it had to be advice with reasonable care and skill.” Since then, complaints for mis-sold investment have continued to pour in, many related to poor financial advice and pressure selling tactics.
If you suspect you’ve been mis-sold an investment, you have the right to complain about the advice you’ve been given. But you may have heard of the so-called ‘six year rule’ that applies to compensation claims – it means that a time limit can be applied if the advice you received was given over six years ago, and you may not eligible to claim compensation as a result.
If you want to better understand the scale of financial mis-selling in British banking, consider this: in the five years from 2011 to 2016, four of the UK’s biggest high street banks will have paid out at least £61 billion in penalties. That’s nearly double the GDP of Luxembourg.
After sending a report to Santander, they agreed with our findings and awarded Mr Snowden an amount of £7,000 made up from a refund of the losses together with interest and compensation.