Using a Claims Management Company to make a Claim

The vast majority of people now look to use Claims Management Companies in order to make financial claims on their behalf.  They find the rigmarole of dealing with their Banks far too tedious and time-consuming.  This is particularly so in relation to Packaged Bank Account (PBA) charges, as these can be quite complicated in their nature, and in the way that the Banks respond to these particular forms of complaint.

Dealing with a Claims Management Company can also, in some ways, be difficult itself.  Before employing one to work on your behalf, you should cover a couple of rudimentary checks, unless of course that Claims Management Company has been recommended to you personally.

The first and most important aspect of checking whether a Claims Management Company is any good is to firstly see if they have been regulated by the Claims Management Regulator at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ).  You will determine this by finding their Claims Regulation Number or “CRM” number, which is usually at the foot of their website or certainly detailed on any correspondence that you have with them.  Whilst this is not an endorsement by the Ministry of Justice as to their abilities to conduct claims, it does mean that they have passed a certain amount of scrutiny, and are regulated to conduct claims on behalf of clients.

The second aspect is to satisfy yourself as to how, and why you are choosing these particular companies.  For example, did they contact you direct, or did you make the initial approach?  Was the initial approach by way of a response to an email/text enquiry, or was it by way of an advert on a website encouraging you to contact them?  Did you contact them as a result of either seeing them on the natural listings of google, for instance, or by way of an introduction from somebody that you already know to have dealt with them?

As a Company we do not believe in proactively marketing.  We only have our websites that detail the various services that we provide.  It is therefore up to individuals, if they wish to use us, to contact us.  We make no formal approach to them and operate purely on self-introductions either through existing clients, or people using our websites and then contacting us, after reading details on us.

The next area that you should of course check is the Company’s background.  You can easily do this by putting a search into a search engine for the business, reading reviews, or of course contacting them and seeing how they respond.  For example, will it be an actual individual dealing with your claim, or are you likely to be fielded off to some large faceless office dealing with transactions on a number by number basis?

As a business, we operate with a small team.  Our Director, Martin Knipe, oversees all claims.  He has experience in dealing with claims for over 18 years with a background working in High Street Banks within various roles, which enables him to deal with clients’ difficulties, regardless of the complaint that they may have.  Primarily, he has been dealing with a considerable number of Packaged Bank Account charge claims.  We are in active discussions with a number of Banks concerning these claims, and we continue to increase these as the claims themselves increase.

Claims Management Companies have had an extremely bad reputation in years gone by, but most of those rogue traders have now been weeded out.  It is however important that you do appoint the correct Claims Management Company and make sure that there is nothing in the small print which means that they either sell or pass on your information to any third parties or charge you any fees in the event the claim, for whatever reason, is unsuccessful.

No Firm should charge an upfront fee or a back-end fee if a claim is unsuccessful.  There should only be one fee payable, and that fee is based upon the result of a successful claim, namely a refund has been made.