Yeah whatever you do don't use a company.

I don't know what you've been told on MSE, but it's nonsense. You cannot "start the process again" if you have already raised a complaint. If he complained over the telephone then that is just as valid a complaint as a written one and hence they have probably investigated it and issued a final response. What you can do is request a copy of this response and, if you disagree with it, contact FOS and see if they will consider the above as special reasons to look at it outside the 6 month time frame. Incidentally you are wasting your time sending SARS, which are not going to be any help during a complaints process. And a SAR to the lender would be unlikely to turn up anything regarding the claim, since this probably would have been dealt with by a separate insurance company.

What is your actual complaint? The answer dictates who you would make it to. If your complaint is that you were told that the insurance was a condition of the offer and it wasn't then any complaint would be made to the broker. However, given the date, the broker is unlikely to have been regulated and is therefore not obliged to consider the complaint. Also, from what you've said it appears that the cover was indeed a condition of the offer and therefore you were not actually misled or misinformed.

I think you need to ask your father in law whether what they are saying is correct. If it is and he has previously complained and is outside the six month timescale for FOS referral then that is it. FOS will only consider anything outside that time scale if there are exceptional circumstances which mean that he COULD NOT reasonably have referred the matter to them within 6 months of the final decision. You don't get to start the complaint again. There is a reason for the six month rule, which is that regardless of the rights or wrongs of the matter, It is not reasonable to allow the matter to drag out indefinitely. Six months is ample to review their decision and decide whether to go to FOS if you are not happy with it. If they are wrong and he has not previously complained then I suggest you tell them that.

I am making no judgement whatsoever as to whether the product was missold or not. I am in no position to make any such judgement as I wasn't there and don't have the paperwork. Simply explaining the approach that may be taken by the FSCS to assessing your complaint (which is also the way the FOS would be likely to view it). There are a lot of similarities between mortgage PPI and income protection and it is quite possible for a layman to get confused by terminology. In the absence of any proof of what was or wasn't said, FSCS would have to rely on the available paperwork. If you bought the product from an IFA there would have been a suitability report outlining what product was recommended and why. I suggest you have a look at this if you still have a copy.

I think you're probably over complicating things. What it comes down to is when the OP received those statements with credit card protection or whatever charged on it, they would have realised then that they were paying for something (and, assuming memory serves the OP correctly) that it was something they hadn't asked for. Whether it is PPI or not is somewhat academic. On realising you were paying for something you hadn't asked for, the logical course of action would be to query/complain there and then rather than waiting several years. The OP is clearly capable of understanding and querying the payment as evidenced by the OP doing so years down the line. The FOS response is basically "you should have raised it at the time". The OP can ask for an Ombudsman to consider the matter as suggested in the response letter. However, it is only a minority of cases where they would overturn an adjudicator's decision so it's probably best not to expect too much. I know someone mentioned issuing court proceedings and this is something which should only be contemplated if the OP can afford to pay costs. Banks responses to this are unpredictable, sometimes they can't be bothered with the hassle and will just pay out, sometimes they will dig their heels in and throw the expensive lawyers at it. It would not be wise to assume the first scenario.

Santander are right, they did not sell the product and it is of no relevance who the payments were made to (are you sure the insurance payments were made to them in any case as opposed to just the mortgage payments, or were they with a separate insurer?). Therefore, any complaint would be against the IFA and, if they are no longer trading, the FSCS. The other problem with this one is that if I read your post correctly then you are stating that you were, in effect, underinsured. acknowledging that you had a want/need for cover but that you wanted more cover and for longer. FSCS may therefore take the line that you are acknowledging you had a need for the cover and were eligible for it and because you haven't had to make a claim, you have suffered no financial loss. Therefore, the correct way to deal with the issue would simply be to increase the cover on the policy, or if this can't be done then to cancel it and take out an income protection plan for a higher amount and a longer term (do also note that MPPI sometimes covers unemployment as well, which income protection doesn't).

It's been a while since I posted on this forum, but as a former compliance officer I can confirm that Mighty Mouse is right. The document posted by DX was an FCA consultation paper. This is effectively where the FCA sets out a proposed approach to a certain matter and invites comments. The proposals are not rules, merely suggestions which they are inviting feedback on. This dated back to 2009. The FCA rules on timebarring state the following (as Mighty Mouse has stated, this is in the FCA handbook of rules and guidance under DISP 2.8.2 and therefore DOES have the status of a rule: R09/07/2015 The Ombudsman cannot consider a complaint if the complainant refers it to the Financial Ombudsman Service: (1) more than six months after the date on which the respondent sent the complainant its final response or redress determination or summary resolution communication; or (2) more than: (a) six years after the event complained of; or (if later) (b) three years from the date on which the complainant became aware (or ought reasonably to have become aware) that he had cause for complaint; In this case I am assuming (OP correct me if I am wrong) that the policy commenced more than 6 years ago and hence the first part of this is satisfied, i.e. the sale is over 6 years old. It therefore comes down to the second part - should the OP have reasonably been aware over 3 years ago that there were grounds for complaint Firstly, there is not and never has been any absolute rule that the lender has to send out a CCL to start the three year clock running. This is simply the most common route for doing so, since the regulator accepts that receipt of such a letter is unarguably confirmation that the customer ought to have been reasonably aware. However, if the lender can argue that other circumstances prove reasonable awareness then they can have a timebar applied without having issued a CCL. It all hinges on the circumstances of the individual case. In this instance the specific complaint was that the OP had not requested PPI. The OP stated "I did not know i had ppi on the card until i found an old statement last year". Their position is that the OP obviously received that statement more than 3 years ago (as evidenced by the date of the statement) and the PPI entry shows clearly on it. Therefore, the OP ought reasonably to have been aware at the time of receiving it that the PPI had been added and (if the claim that the OP did not ask for it is correct) that there were grounds for complaint. Therefore, the OP should have done so at the time. I appreciate that this may be unpalatable to some, but those are the rules and that is how FOS are looking at it. Unless the OP can provide a convincing rebuttal then they are unlikely to change that view ("I didn't read the statement" is unlikely to be accepted as the rule is about whether you ought reasonably to have been aware, FOS considers it reasonable that people would read their credit card statements).

They are. If you type Harringtons Advisory into the search field it will come up. As regards what is stated on the FCA website, if a firm is providing, or trying to provide, investment services to UK residents then the FCA will be interested since the firm is supposed to be authorised by it to do so. However, as they are doing it by telephone from an office based in Spain there is not a right lot the FCA can do about it. However, the point remains that this is a different company. The FCA has no remit whatsoever over Harringtons Advisory the CMC.

A few comments on this thread. Firstly, Harrington's Advisory based in Bury is a claims management company authorised by the Ministry of Justice. Not that it makes them any good or makes it worth using them, but they are at least permitted to represent complainants in PPI complaints (see the MOJ regisyter at https://www.claimsregulation.gov.uk/details.aspx/29496/Harringtons_Advisory_Limited/?search=simple&business=harringtons+advisory&authID=&sector=-1&county=-1&status=-1). They are also a UK incorporated entity and their incorporation is confirmed on the register held by Companies House (see https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/07933572). Harringtons Advisory Services, based in Barcelona, is a well known investment [problem] outfit whose activities have been going back at least ten years ( see http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-1508926/Friends-swindled-out-of-163143000.html). If the UK entity was anything to do with it, the FCA would have had them shut down long ago for conducting unauthorised financial services activities (they are not authorised by the FCA to carry out financial services business). However, they are not. Therefore, it is pointless speaking to the FCA about their conduct, they do not regulate them and are powerless to act. The best suggestion is the first one, write to them on your friend's behalf and ask for a copy of any authority signed by him to act on his behalf (you may need a letter of authority signed by him to do this). If there is no agreement then there is no debt. However, just be aware that their letter insinuates that they have been made aware by the bank of the offer, which would not normally happen unless they had produced signed authority to act on his behalf. Even if the bank sent the offer directly to him, which nearly all of them do, this does not absolve him of his responsibility to pay the CMC if indeed he has signed a contract. Therefore, the copy request is the route you should pursue in the first instance as you need to find this out before you can do anything. What "relevant bodies" exactly are you proposing that he complains to and about what? I'm no fan of CMCs or their greedy and abrasive sales tactics and agree their credit control teams can be well out of line too. However, if the OP's friend does indeed owe this CMC money then they are entitled to chase it. Writing to say he wants no further contact is not going to suddenly stop them chasing it and is likely to result in them following through with their threat to serve a court summons (I say likely as depending on the amounts involved they may just decide it's not worth bothering, but this is a risky thing to rely on). As per my previous post, first port of call needs to be to establish whether he does in fact have a valid contract with them. Different company. Also, the FOS and FSCS have nothing whatsoever to do with contracts between CMCs and consumers.

You do realise that as the plaintiff, the onus is on you to prove some kind of lawful wrongdoing? What is the legal basis of your case? As I'm struggling to find it.

It is a requirement of FCA rules that when redressing your complaint, they consider any consequential loss arising as a result of the missale of PPI. With credit cards, it is easy to establish as the account balance can be reconstructed to what it would have been with and without the PPI and any charges resulting from the PPI can be refunded. Current accounts are more difficult as they are not directly linked to the product. I am not aware of anyone having much success with this approach. You would basically need to prove that the charges were a direct result of the PPI and only the PPI, I.e. that there was no unnecessary or non essential expenditure in your account during that time period and the charges are not partly of your own making (e.g it's no good blaming the PPI for your account charges if your statements show use in takeaways, bars, cinemas etc...)

It stands for card protection plan. It is a product designed to protect you in the event of theft/fraudulent use of your card. The key is that in most cases they were pretty unnecessary since you are already protected from this under (I think) section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act. PPI is a different product which protects your credit repayments by making them for you if you are unable to work due to accident, sickness or involuntary unemployment. They are separate products and if one started around the time the other finished, this is almost certainly entirely coincidental. Therefore, if you want to make a complaint about missale, each would be a separate issue. I don't have credit anymore and have only ever used Experian so not totally sure. Typically they only go back six years in any case. In any case, this is of no real relevance to a complaint about insurance missale. I would think that it means the debt has been sold on by the original lender to Lowells. I.e. you no longer owe anything to the original lender, but instead owe the money to Lowells. The dates are just the date that the record was updated. There may have been an error in one of the updates. Unfortunately, this is not a "get out of jail free" card with regards to repaying the debt.

This is all totally dependent on your card balance and the amount you paid in premiums between those dates.

This isn't a valid complaint reason. Insurance is there to protect you from UNEXPECTED mishaps. None of us have a crystal ball. There is nobody who is immune from a sudden illness and there are any number of blue chip companies that have either suddenly gone bust or decided to restructure and let staff go. If you had a serious pre-existing illness which was excluded and would have seriously restricted you from claiming then that might have been grounds for complaint. Likewise if you had reason to think you were going to be made redundant that would be grounds for complaint as the policy wouldn't have covered you. But insurance being taken out to cover someone who is healthy and in employment against a sudden unexpected change in circumstances is not misselling. It's simply prudent.