The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has handed its largest ever fine for payment protection insurance (PPI) failings to Clydesdale Bank Plc.
The bank was fined £20,678,300 for serious failings in its PPI complaint handling processes between May 2011 and July 2013. The FCA found that up to 42,200 out of 126,600 PPI complaints decided between those dates may have been unfairly rejected, and up to 50,900 upheld complaints may have resulted in inadequate redress for customers.
Clydesdale’s PPI complaint handlers did not take into account all relevant documents when handling complaints. The bank provided false information to the Financial Ombudsman Service in response to requests for evidence of the records it held on PPI policies sold to individual customers.
Georgina Philippou, the FCA’s acting director of enforcement and market oversight, says: “The fact that Clydesdale misled the Financial Ombudsman by providing false information about the information it held is particularly serious and this is reflected in the size of the fine.”
