Payment protection insurance (PPI) was mis-sold on a massive scale. As a result, the UK’s banks have been haemorrhaging huge sums of money over the past 5 years as they repay the customers they originally duped. Many banks were guilty of mis-selling PPI, but one of them stands head and shoulders above the rest in just about every way. That bank is of course Lloyds. Not content with mis-selling PPI in the first place, some banks have been found to have been rejecting legitimate PPI claims. Lloyds is the worst offender for rejecting legitimate PPI claims. Back in June 2013, an undercover reporter for The Times began training as PPI claims handler for Lloyds. He reported how he was told that some bank salesmen had faked PPI information in agreements on loan sales. His training then went on to instruct complaint handlers to ignore the fact that many salesmen forged loan agreements. Lloyds had sold the most PPI policies between 1990 and 2010, so it stood to reason that they would receive the most complaints. They were well aware that the average person would give up on their claim if it was initially rejected, which is what they capitalized on. It turns out in fact that around 9 in every 10 people that were rejected simply gave up, which is exactly what Lloyds were banking on (pun intended). Beat The PPI Deadline While the deadline for claiming PPI hasn’t been introduced yet, it’s only a formality before it is. Once it’s in place, anyone who hasn’t yet claimed their money back will have 2 years to do so. Two years can seem like a long time, but it will go by fast. We only need to look back at when they PPI scandal first broke for evidence of that. That was in April 2011 and those 5 years have gone by pretty quick. While Lloyds has allegedly cleaned up its procedures for processing claims, recent evidence suggests they still have a long way to go. Figures released in the middle of 2015 showed that Lloyds was once again top of the table for the amount of complaints upheld against them. The figures showed that of all PPI complaints against Lloyds, a whopping 93% were upheld in the customer’s favor. The Key Thing To Keep In Mind In order for the Financial Ombudsman to uphold a complaint against any bank, that bank has to have rejected the claim to begin with. You can’t go straight to the Ombudsman to claim for PPI; you must go to your bank in the first instance. In order to allow enough time for the whole process to play out, allowing for any ‘funny business’ from the banks, it really is best to start your claim sooner rather than later. If your claim is initially rejected by your bank, the appeals process with the Ombudsman can take anything up to 18 months to complete, sometimes more. To keep well within the safe limit for claiming, now is the absolutely best time to do so. Not only will your claim be completed before the deadline hits, you’ll also beat the rush because you can be sure many people won’t heed this advice and will wait until the last minute to claim.