More news about unscrupulous payday loan companies today. The Financial Ombudsman has revealed that complaints about these firms rocketed by 178 per cent in the year to March.
That is despite the fact that new controls on lenders were brought in by the regulator several months earlier. There were 3,216 complaints about short-term loans in 2015/16, compared to 1,157 the year before. But Payment Protection Insurance remained the most complained-about financial product. There were 188,712 complaints about PPI over the year, a drop of 8 per cent on 2014/15. In a welcome move for pension-holders, the Financial Conduct Authority has proposed that for existing contract-based personal pensions, including workplace personal pensions, exit charges will be capped at 1 per cent of the value of a member’s pot. Firms will not be able to apply any exit charge for personal pension contracts entered into after proposed new rules come into force. Christopher Woolard, director of strategy and competition at the FCA, said: ‘Together with the ban on exit fees in future contracts, we are proposing a 1 per cent cap on exit charges in existing contracts to ensure people can access their pension pots without being deterred by charges.
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