Reclaim PPI Against Yorkshire Bank
There have been many times in recent years when our investigations proved that Yorkshire Bank were mis-selling PPI on a huge scale. The company pushed their sales team to sell, sell and sell again, despite the fact that Payment Protection Insurance was often of little or no use to many of its customers. If you were one of those unfortunate customers, we’d like to hear from you as soon as possible.
Yorkshire Bank is now a trading division of Clydesdale Bank, another high street name that embraced aggressive selling of PPI during the lending boom. Clydesdale were fined a then-record £20.7 million for serious failings when handling compensation claims, after it was proved that they lied to customers and to the Financial Ombudsman.
The origins of the Yorkshire Bank go back to the 1850s. It started life as the quaintly named West Riding Penny Savings Bank, which at the time was a non-profit organisation. By the time the lending boom of the late 1980s and 1990s was in full flow, it was anything but that. The push for profits via overly enthusiastic selling of policies was paramount, with sales teams receiving hefty incentives to reach targets.
One of the more distasteful tactics used by Yorkshire Bank involved contacting loan customers a few months into their new loan periods and offering further borrowing. Often customers didn’t need it, but in those days we tended to trust our banks and building societies far more than we do now. If the bank was offering more borrowing it had to be a good thing, right?
As many of its customers struggled to keep up with payments on more borrowing and perhaps high credit card balances, Yorkshire Bank could just sit back and watch the money flowing in. And with PPI policies attached to those loans, credit cards and mortgages it was getting better and better. Perhaps inevitably, the credit crunch hit and the whole gravy train ground to a halt.
