A&L

I see that Alliance & Leicester have been fined big for mis–selling payment protection insurance on personal loans. I am totally unsurprised by this. I took out an A&L loan during the relevant period and I remember being struck by the very good headline interest rate, coupled with enormous pressure from transparently self–interested “advisors”, both over the phone and in correspondence, to take out very expensive optional PPI. I remember thinking that a borrower who wasn’t paying careful attention could easily have ended up turning a very competitive loan into a very uncompetitive one, by paying a large amount for insurance in relation to which the borrower paid the premium, but the lender was the essentially beneficiary. “How can this be legal?”, I thought at the time.

Labels: customer service