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Payment Protection insurance (PPI) is often mis-sold as a result of greedy financial services looking to make an easy and tidy profit. PPI is usually sold by financial institutions such as banks, money lenders, car finance companies, Credit Card companies and the like. PPI has been a profitable business for some time now and only in the last few years have the financial authorities really made any major changes to help protect the consumer.

PPI can cost the customer as much (or even more) as the interest paid back over the period of the loan or credit agreement, so it’s not hard to see why PPI is so often given the hard sell. The problem which comes with this method of selling is that the sale is often rushed through or little time for discussion is given to the full details of what PPI really covers or entails.

In most circumstances a customer never gets to find out if the policy sold to them was in fact suitable for their needs or mis-sold as they do not have the misfortune of finding themselves in a situation where a claim is needed to be made. A dreadful time to discover that a policy was mis-sold is when a customer finds they really need to make a claim, so often policies are taken out in order to protect against unemployment or other positions where financial difficulty may occur and finding out you’ve been paying into an expensive scheme which will not deliver because you do not meet certain criteria can be devastating.

Common sense would denote that certain questions should have been asked before a policy was undertaken or that a detailed copy of the terms and conditions be issued to the customer, but in so many situations this was found not to be the case at all.

Millions of people have purchased PPI under the mistaken belief that it was compulsory or that it would improve their chances of acquiring credit approval. This is just one of the reasons why massive fines have been imposed and changes in policy have been made over the last few years. Changes are still being made to the system and only today it was announced by The Financial Services Authority (FSA) that much larger fines will be imposed in the future if companies are still found to be mis-selling PPI. Individual traders can also be financially penalised under the new rules.

PPI is no longer allowed to be sold at the same time as the selling of loans or credit agreements, this indicates that the FSA recognised how severe the problem of mis-selling of PPI really was and under which conditions it was most commonly occurring.

The Financial Ombudsman Service is predicting an 18% rise in complaints over this year.

he statistic is indicative that the public feels the banks are systematically cheating them with their excessive bank charges, compulsory payment protection insurance, APR hikes, non payouts on life and critical illness insurance and unfair loan agreements.

The FOS told the Tax Incentives Savings Association conference in London that it expects to take on 150,000 new cases in 2009/10 jumping from 127,471 last year. It is budgeting for complaints about investments and pensions to increase to 35,000 next year from 22,265.

It is believed that inquiries will increase to 975,000 from 790,000 last year. An increase of 18%.

Complaints about mortgages and cancelled insurance policies would fuel some of this rise in cases, he said. The ombudsman also expects the number of cases it resolves to increase to 165,000 cases from 113,000 last year.

Niall Jeewoonarain an FOS external relationship manager said that outsourcing adjudication of payment protection insurance complaints to accountants Deloitte would help the ombudsman to close more cases.