Wednesday, October 20, 2004

FOS Gets Tough

It seems that the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) is now thoroughly fed up with the tactics used by the life assurance companies, in trying to evade paying for their lousy underperforming endowment polices that 8 million UK households are saddled with.

The FOS has warned the life assurers that they will face large fines if they don't clean up their act.

The FOS is reportedly to be of the opinion that some endowment providers routinely rejected complaints, that they knew would be upheld if they were referred to the FOS.

I understand that at the end of March 2004, life assurance companies had handled 452,201 endowment complaints while the FOS had dealt with around 125,000.

Large fines are all very well and good, but the life assurance companies are wealthy enough to weather those; and indeed will probably just pass the costs on to the hapless policy holders.

What is needed is for the life assurance companies to underwrite these underperforming, poorly designed, polices.

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