Posts tagged as misselling

15 Jun 2007

Barclays Bank to take over trust-based financial planning – oh yes?

Barclays Bank has moved its tanks (a 900-strong regiment of ‘Financial Planning Managers’) onto the independent financial advisers’ lawn. Barclays’ National Sales Director has told an industry conference (PIMS) that it has the people, ‘sales training programme’, processes and ‘open-architecture’ products in place to dominate the IFAs’ high-net-worth client segment. Could this be the same Barclays Bank whose people and processes were secretly filmed by Channel 4, responding to deliberate management incentives to sell unwanted and poor-value services to anyone foolish enough to wander into a branch? See my post on the programme.

read more Commentary by Stuart Fowler
24 Mar 2007

Barclays Bank: Not treating customers fairly starts – and ends – in the board room

“Lying to customers, mis-selling products, fraudulent accounts, and unscrupulous sales tactics – an undercover investigation reveals the hidden side of a high-street bank.” Wednesday night’s BBC Whistleblower investigation was based on an under-cover reporter’s nine months of employment by Barclays Bank, in a call centre and in a branch. Nobody watching the filmed evidence of shockingly cynical practices could have avoided a conclusion (not over-played by the film makers) that these were a direct response to remuneration incentives put in place by senior management of retail banking.

read more Commentary by Stuart Fowler
19 Mar 2006

Government in pension misselling scandal

So says the Parliamentary Ombudsman, Ann Abraham. It is rare to find government departments guilty of ‘maladministration’: it’s a hard charge to stick. It did not stick with Equitable, even though the DTI clearly was not up to the task of assessing the life company’s reserving adequacy, because the fault lay with Parliament’s mandate to the DTI not the DTI’s execution of its mandate. But in the case of the 80,000 people who lost their pension rights when their employer failed, there was no such excuse. In its desire to encourage pension scheme membership, the Government has repeatedly claimed that occupational pension scheme benefits were guaranteed. ‘Guaranteed’ is a term unscrupulous financial sales staff have played fast and furious with and lies behind all of the misselling scandals of recent memory.

read more Commentary by Stuart Fowler
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