Complaints

We regard a complaint as being:

‘any oral or written expression of dissatisfaction, whether justified or not, from, or on behalf of, a person about the provision of, or failure to provide, a financial service, which alleges that the complainant has suffered (or may suffer) financial loss, material distress or material inconvenience’.

On receipt of a complaint, we will pass the details onto our Compliance Officer; Robert Johnson, who will be responsible for ensuring that any complaint will be dealt with promptly and fairly.

Acknowledging Your Complaint

We will record your complaint on receipt. If your complaint cannot be resolved by the close within 3 working days following its receipt, we will send you a written acknowledgement of your complaint within 5 working days. Within the acknowledgement letter, or at any time on request, we will provide you with a copy of our full complaint procedures.

If you make an oral complaint, our written acknowledgement will set out our understanding of your complaint.

If we have reasonable grounds to be satisfied that another firm may be solely or jointly responsible for the allegation(s) made, we will promptly forward the complaint or relevant part of it, to that firm. We will write to you to confirm our actions and provide contact details of the firm concerned.

Investigating Your Complaint

Your complaint will be investigated by our Compliance Officer; Robert Johnson who will gather all documentation required in order to conduct the investigation thoroughly and objectively.

Keeping You Informed

We will keep you informed of our progress and will let you know if there is any further information or copy documentation that we require from you. We will aim to deal with your complaint as quickly as possible and will endeavour to communicate with you in a clear and fair manner at all times.

If we have not resolved your complaint within 8 weeks from date of receipt, we will write to you again with the reasons for the delay. We will confirm when we expect to issue our Final Response letter.

We will also provide you with details of your right to refer the matter to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS). The FOS can be contacted as follows:

• The Financial Ombudsman Service, Exchange Tower, London, E14 9SR
• financial-ombudsman.org.uk
• 0800 023 4567
• info@financial-ombudsman.org.uk

Resolving Your Complaint

When we have finalised our investigation into your complaint, we will issue our Final Response letter.

Our Final Response letter will be fair, clear and not misleading and it will provide:

• our understanding of your complaint
• details of the investigation;
• the outcome of the investigation;
• if appropriate, any offer of remedial action(s) or the appropriate level of redress (or both), and the basis of calculation or the reasons for declining redress
  

Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS)

If you are not satisfied with our Final Response, you have the right to refer your complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service, free of charge.

 The Ombudsman might not be able to consider your complaint if:

• what you’re complaining about happened more than six years ago, and
• you’re complaining more than three years after you realised (or should have realised) that there was a problem.

We will tell you if we think that your complaint is made outside of these time limits but this is a matter for the Ombudsman to decide. If the Ombudsman agrees with us, they will not have our permission to consider your complaint so we will only be able to do so in very limited circumstances.

If you do decide to refer your complaint to the Ombudsman you must do so within 6 months of our final response letter.

If you do not refer your complaint to the Ombudsman within 6 months of the date of the letter, the Ombudsman will not have our permission to consider your complaint and so will be able to do so in very limited circumstances.