A PBA or Packaged Bank Account claim is one where you have, for some reason, got concerns or reservations about the account facility that you either had in the past, or have now and do not necessarily believe you should have had, as the fee you are paying each month is either a drain on your finances or you consider it to be of no benefit to you whatsoever.
With £15 to £30 per month leaving your account, if you are in a position to be able to afford this, then the likelihood is that the Packaged Bank Account facility may well be of some benefit to you, in that you can afford the luxury of an account of this nature. However, the vast majority of people are unable to afford this type of expense, particularly regarding an account which ultimately has no financial benefit for them. This is because the various attachments to the product do not cover all eventualities that they will utilise in the future.
Of course, certain elements, such as travel insurance, can be of benefit. However, when the travel insurance is taken, one must not be totally reliant upon it as there are various limitations because it is a cheap form of travel insurance. Firstly, it does not deal with certain extreme sports for certain types of holidays abroad. It also does not deal with certain areas abroad, where you may have to travel.
Therefore, you could well be going away on holiday under the misguided belief that you are covered by insurance, but you are not. You do not unfortunately find this out however until it is too late and, with the costs of shipping an individual who is ill abroad back to the UK, can cost huge sums of money. This is of course not the time that you want to find out that the insurance product that you took out is not worth the paper it is written on when you are in that situation.
There are other aspects of cover which would have needed to have been discussed at the time of sale in order to qualify and that you needed to address. For example, with telephone cover you needed to phone a specific hotline to make sure that the phones that you wished to cover were added onto the policy. Of course, this needed to be updated whenever the phone was changed, or alterations were made in order to validate any particular claim, but you may well not have been advised of this.
In addition, if you had roadside assistance cover with your Packaged Bank Account facility, this would only again be a limited policy and you would need to clarify what the limitations are. Most of them only covered you to repair the vehicle and take the vehicle to the nearest garage. Of course, this is no good if you are stuck in the middle of nowhere, and taken to a garage in the middle of nowhere and which is not open until the next day!
Therefore, the policy itself (whilst it does give some degree of cover) does not give the protection to a client that they perhaps would expect, and this can lead to serious problems should the policy be called upon.
However, the main problem with the product is that it was sold by the Banks, rather than explored and sought out by the customer.
Therefore, it is essential that if you do have a Packaged Bank Account facility that we look at this for you to ascertain whether the product was sold to you in the correct way. Should it be established that it was not sold in a way that was appropriate, we would then challenge the Bank and seek redress to take into account a refund of the various charges, and interest associated.
Of course, this is all on a “No Win No Fee” basis in order to protect you, as the client.