UK'S FSA CALLS FOR REVIEW OF PPI SALES

The UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) is to ask financial services companies to review the way in which they sell payment protection insurance (PPI). The FSA said that it wants to reduce the extent of hard-selling and mis-selling. FSA managing director of retail markets John Pain said that "consumers should not be pressured or deceived into buying PPI and they are entitled to have a policy properly explained to them". The FSA intends to issue guidelines that will take effect before the end of the year that will ensure that any complaints about PPI are handled properly. The FSA is also to ask firms to reassess some 185,000 complaints that had previously been rejected. It said that firms were rejecting too many complaints with the industry as a whole throwing out 60% of cases, while some companies rejected nearly all complaints. The FSA noted that Alliance & Leicester, which last year was fined £7m for failings in its PPI sales, had sold 210,000 policies over a three-year period to the end of 2007, at an average cost of £1,265 apiece. But the FSA claimed that A&L advisors consistently failed to give details of the cost of the PPI.