It is not easy to file a claim for an insurance benefit if you do not know you have paid for a policy intended to cover your situation. If you are an insurer and people are paying for one of your products without their knowledge, you can not help but be pleased. Such is often the case when it comes to payment protection insurance, sold by banks, finance companies and other lending institutions. It also the case for a similar, but not identical product known as Credit Protection Insurance, which part and parcel of most credit card contracts.
These products are supposed make the payments on your loan or overdraft debt if you become incapacitated and unable to make the payments due to such things as accident, injury, job loss, illness, etcetera. All of which is fine as far as it goes. Problems arise due to limits the policies usually include but which are rarely discussed in the flurry of paperwork that accompanies most loan or overdraft agreements.
The first issue is that Payment Protection Insurance is almost never 100 percent. The general rule is that the insurer only agrees to make the payments for a year. If your injury or illness in permanent, you are still saddled with the remainder of the loan. That is right: your payment protection insurance will leave stuck at the point where you need it the most. And if you get fired rather than laid off, the insurer will probably deny your claim for so much as a single payment.
These kinds of issue came up repeatedly when the agency that monitors the consumer insurance industry in the United States investigated the PPI and CPI categories of insurance products. The investigation was ignited when a higher than normal amount of complaints, compared to consumer insurance product complaints in general, were noted in the credit and payment protection insurance categories. The investigation revealed widespread mis-selling and misrepresentation was involved in selling such policies to consumers and a number of financial firms were fined as a result.
A pattern was discovered in how the mis-selling takes place. To begin with, insurers pay out a commission to banks and finance companies and mortgage brokers and car financers when they sell a policy as part of a loan agreement.
This alone, while cause for concern, is not in and of itself unethical or illegal. The problem arises when the commission approaches, or in some cases surpasses, the income the lender would receive from the debt repayments were the loan made without tacking on a payment or credit protection policy.
In this type of environment, the incentive to include the policy as if it were an administrative necessity can become the actual business model of a finance company. They literally make their profit selling an insurance product, not making loans.
When we say mandatory, we get to the hub of the matter. When sellers are not sliding the PPI purchase agreement into the pile of documents you must initial when finalizing your credit transaction, they are often telling people they have to buy it or the loan will not be approved.
Other tactics are also widely employed in mis-selling PPI. One tactic that borders on criminal extortion is telling the consumer that the protection is mandatory when it is not. Another is including the policy without even informing the customer that they have it.
Want to find out more about making PPI claims? Then visit www.PPIClaimsUK.co.uk and find out how to start your mis sold PPI claim today.