People Happier with Life Insurance

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has recently started publishing figures that indicate the number of complaints made about particular regulated firms.

Covering a two year period, complaints increased by 5.7 per cent from 1.4 million, to 1.48 million. When looking at life insurance and pensions, complaints decreased during this two year period by 76 per cent. This differs to other forms of insurance, such as general insurance for which complaints doubled during the two year period, leaping to 127,000. This was put down mostly to problems surrounding payment protection policies.

Misleading advice complaints fell by over half and with respect to investments, customer service generated the most complaints, reaching 21 per cent. In fact, customer service complaints increased across all FSA regulated firms by 28 per cent, from 187,000 to 239,500.

Some areas of traditional complaint remained stable, namely the speed with which a complaint was dealt with, as well as the number of claims upheld by regulated firms. By the end of the two year period, only 10 per cent of the complaints made took longer than eight weeks to get settled and 40 per cent of the complaints went in the consumer’s favour.

The fact that the FSA has started publishing these figures has been welcomed by consumers and regulated firms alike. It provides true transparency and enables firms to be able to ensure that are providing the best customer service that they can by benchmarking themselves year-on-year, which in turn has huge and beneficial impact on the consumer.


Annie Valentine