Wheatley Lambasts Outrageous PPI Mis-selling

Martin Wheatley, the CEO of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), is currently appearing before the Treasury Select Committee. He is less than impressed with the fallout from the PPI mis-selling scandal and the way that the banks are handling complaints.

Currently the FOS is upholding 90% of PPI mis-selling cases referred to it after they had been rejected by the banks.

Wheatley says it is "absolutely not acceptable" and that it is "outrageous" that the number upheld by the FOS is so high. He stated that the FCA has been looking into how banks handle complaints, as per the Telegraph:

"We have taken action and we will take more action and we will continue to look at how banks handle complaints. 

We've got two large investigations underway and have two cases where we have issued strong fines."

Sadly PPI mis-selling is but one of many areas where Britain's financial services industry mired itself in its own shit.

TSB Website Crashes

The newly launched TSB bank (split for Lloyds) has had a less than stellar first day, as its website has crashed.

Hardly a good augury for the future!

Fred The Shred and The Round Topped Filing Cabinets

The Telegraph reports that Fred Goodwin, erstwhile CEO of RBS, was so obsessed with tidiness and so irritated with piles of paper on filing cabinets that he ordered thousands of custom-made round-topped storage units to be rolled out across the bank.

A senior manager told Iain Martin, the author of Making it Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy being published next week.

“Somewhere in a warehouse are thousands of old flat-top RBS filing cabinets that were not Fred-compliant.” 

In pre RBS days as chief executive of Clydesdale Bank, Goodwin apparently interrupted a meeting to take a call from his mother who had seen a cigarette butt left on the steps of the bank’s headquarters in Glasgow. Goodwin immediately arranged to have the butt removed.

Sadly this obsessive attention to detail didn't manifest itself in the more "mundane" activities of the bank such as credit, risk and how much is lent and to whom.