After they signed up for our services, a bespoke Letter of Complaint, regarding their Endowment policy, was sent to Prudential on our client’s behalf.
It didn’t take Prudential very long to finalise their investigations. However, when the final decision came through, we found that they had attempted to “Time Bar” the complaint, meaning that they believed that our clients should have put forward their concerns a lot sooner than they did.
For various reasons, it was immediately obvious to our claims experts that this decision should be challenged and plans were quickly put in motion to escalate the matter to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) for an independent and impartial assessment.
Our senior claims manager on the endowment team has been an expert in this area for at least 15 years. He has seen many firms attempt to adapt the complex rules in order to refuse investigating complaints. He is well known within the industry and it was extremely surprising to see Prudential attempting such a weak argument.
With our client’s knowledge and permission, we carefully constructed and issued an appeal, against Prudential’s view, to the FOS. Upon receipt of this dispute, the FOS adjudicator eventually agreed with our stance and felt that, based on the particular circumstances, there was no scope for this type of decision as our senior claims manager had said all along. However, Prudential were not ready to back down just yet and asked for an Ombudsman review. In the final decision letter to both ourselves and Prudential, the FOS were quite critical of Prudential’s application of the complex rules.
Unfortunately for Prudential, but as we had anticipated, the Ombudsman took the decision to agree with both their adjudicator and with our original appeal and ultimately upheld the complaint. As a result, our clients received £2474.92.
However, triumphantly, it meant that Prudential withdrew many of their other dubious Time Barred cases from the FOS and promised to re-open and re-investigate them internally. We are pleased to note that, so far, 6 further clients have benefitted from our expertise regarding this matter.