Endowment

Almost £1bn was paid out by financial services providers as compensation for mis-sold endowment policies last year, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has revealed.

RIGHTMOVE, THE property website, has pulled the plug on its multimillion-pound plans to provide home information packs (Hips), reports The Times .

IFAs who have time-barred endowment complaints brought against them can avoid paying Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) case fees by providing relevant documents quickly.

The number of endowment claims made against IFAs are gradually increasing but this is because the complaints process is much slower than in large insurance companies, say officials at the Financial Ombudsman Service.

THE BITTER DISPUTE between the Financial Services Authority and Legal & General over mortgage endowment mis-selling has flared up again, says the Daily Telegraph , as the insurer has demanded access to the regulator's secret papers.

The crux of whether or not Legal & General had a widespread mis-selling case to answer, in respect of sale of its Flexible Mortgage Policy to consumers, seems in part to relate to the quality of the FSA-commissioned Endowment Sales Review.

Poor handling of endowment mis-selling complaints by financial services firms will increase the number of such cases passing through the Financial Ombudsman Service to around 70,000 cases a year until 2007, alleges the service.

Whitechurch Investment Services and Tudor House Financial Services are two of the 16 firms whose clients could now stand to gain from compensation paid from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

It's that time of year again when we all take stock on the wind down to Christmas, and look back at the past 12 months to see whether the year has really been as good or bad as it felt at the time.

THE FINANCIAL OMBUDSMAN SERVICE (FOS) says it will not be able to cope with the expected increase in mortgage endowment complaints in 2005, unless steps are taken to force providers to settle cases themselves, the Telegraph says.