Ms M found us via Facebook and came to us to see if her Free Standing Additional Voluntary Contribution (FSAVC) with Legal & General was mis-sold. Ms M was sold the policy as a teacher by Legal & General who’s policies are now held by Reassure.
Firstly, we checked with Ms M to see if she had any paperwork or the policy number and if not we could easily do an information request to Reassure to gain the information needed. After a week they came back with the information we asked for so then we could write a detailed letter of complaint and send it off to Reassure.
3 weeks later we received a questionnaire request to be able to gain more information from when the client took this policy out. We as a company go through these questionnaires with the clients to be able to obtain to best detailed answers. Once we had, had a conversation with Ms M it was sent to her for signing, we sent this back to Reassure for them to do their investigation.
After another week the investigator at Reassure rang us and said Ms M’s case was going to be upheld however their calculations would be capped at 1998 as they have no records and that as the client met with an advisor Ms M would have been made aware of the alternative in-house scheme.
Our general manager was not happy with them capping the calculations so put together an appeal to send to Reassure. In the appeal we have noted that Reassure provided a letter dated 1998 that they considered proved Ms M was made aware of the In-house AVC options, however from what we can see there is nothing within the letter to show the alternative options were explained and/or discussed. The letter only says the advisor needed to provide up to date information on this for the client. We found no evidence of this in the letter and there were also no enclosures provided for Ms M.
What we stated to them in the appeal letter as above is what was required by the regulators in 1998 and this not being done means that the advisor at the time did not follow the requirements.
Reassure wrote to us a month later and said that after having reviewed their position, they were willing to calculate the loss for the entire period and won’t be capping at 1998. This was a good result for us and Ms M as it meant she will get all compensation she is owed.
After another month Reassure finished their calculations and we received and offer of £38,436.30 paid into a new pension fund. We telephone Mrs M not to accept this offer and asked for her to supply evidence of current salary, benefit statement ending April 2021 and contribution level current aid to FSAVC.
Once all this was supplied by Ms M our general manager sent it to Reassure along with another appeal letter as the offer was not appropriate to be paid into a fund due to tax implications.
A couple of weeks after the second appeal had been sent we received an email from Reassure saying ‘ We are willing to offer a cash settlement on this case based on the information you have presented’ The offer will be reissued. We let Ms M know that we will now be expecting a new offer in the post in the next couple of weeks. Ms M was very happy to hear this.
New Offer received 2 weeks later which is now a cash offer of £32,995.65. Ms M was very happy with this and thankful that we didn’t give up and accept the earlier offers.