Recommended by his sister in-law after her successful case, Mr M asked us to investigate his Free Standing AVC with Scottish Amicable as he knew he could trust us for the job.
Mr M had little information on the FSAVC plan he had held as he had retired some years ago and bought an annuity with a different provider. One thing he was certain of though was that it was a Scottish Amicable plan like his sister in-law’s as they had often commented that neither policy was particularly good.
Tracing policies is a critical first step in the process of seeking compensation for mis-sold FSAVC policies. Once policies are identified, claims management companies such as It IS Your Money can assess the circumstances surrounding the sale, evaluate the extent of mis-selling, and pursue compensation through negotiation or legal channels.
One of the key challenges faced is that Scottish Amicable were acquired by Prudential in the late 1990’s and whilst Prudential will honour claims related to policies sold by Scottish Amicable, the tracing of policies can be problematic. That was to be proven with this case.
Even though Mr M didn’t have the policy information we are able to send an information request along some identification.
Prudential came back saying they couldn’t locate the client and therefore unable to provide any policy information, but we knew Mr M had previously held a Scottish Amicable policy.
Despite being obliged to keep records indefinitely for FSAVC plans, we see this type of response from providers far too often.
Fortunately, we knew that Mr M’s annuity was with Legal & General so we could go to them with an authority form to see what details they had.
Again because of past acquisitions of firms, Legal & General are not always easy to deal with but we knew if we could obtain information on the annuity, we would have a good chance of tracing the Scottish Amicable plan.
Legal & General did eventually provide the annuity history and this showed there were two transfers from Prudential – A large amount from a Prudential Teachers AVC and a smaller amount from what was called a Prudential Pension Plan. After thorough checks within our library of policy information, we were able to confirm the second plan was an FSAVC rather than any Personal Pension. This meant we were able to send the complaint.
The complaint process on this case was fairly straight forward as Prudential soon found that their own Teachers AVC Facility would have been the far better option for Mr M. They did need details of his annuity, but we now held these on file.
Mr M was very grateful that we kept trying and didn’t give up. He was extremely pleased with the offer of compensation of nearly £10,000 a month later.