Reply To: Creation Financial Services bashing

[EwanG]

JDB wrote:

The thing is that, realistically how much time and energy did you need to put into making a complaint and going to the FOS? The FOS deals with tens of thousands of complaints and it judges that many like these Creation ones really aren’t beyond the aggravations one encounters in daily life and as such don’t meet the threshold for them to order compensation for distress and inconvenience. The sums involved are also incredibly small. The FOS publishes its criteria for D&I payments and interest payments (set at a standard 8% simple interest) and most of these these cases don’t really get very close.

FOS, like many organisations, deal with much more rubbish than they should do. If consumers had a bit more common sense, so many of the cases could have been resolved sooner, and with less effort. Or not arisen in the first place, however I also appreciate that some have a more basic understanding on how products work than others, despite efforts of companies (and this expands beyond FS) to make them simpler and easy to understand.

How much time and energy had I put in – a fair amount, given, like you, I want to put forward a fair and reasoned argument why the firm have not taken the correct action and what steps I have done to fix that. Complaints do not write themselves.

When the investigator rejected my request for a small monetary amount for compensation, they included a link to when they would apply D&I payments. It states “…apology or small monetary award of less than £100 will fairly compensate a one-off incident or occurrence – such as a small administrative error or a short delay…”
This whole saga is not down to an administrative error – it was a clear business decision, and I referenced this in my rejection (and to be clear, I rejected it on more significant grounds than just a small compensatory payment!)

What we can also see in the thread here and in the published cases determined by an Ombudsman is the FOS and consistently inconsistent. To me that is another area of improvement for FOS.