I Have A Compliance Question

Financial Chat
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So, first off, this is an insurance compliance question, but I’m hoping that there will be sufficient crossover with banking for some of the banking experts here to help me.

I have a complaint running with an insurance company. In short, I made a payment, but the insurance wasn’t enacted and the agent said the best thing would be to do it all again and be refunded the initial payment. That payment was only partially refunded for some reason. Over a series of subsequent calls I was repeatedly told that it should be refunded, but they’d need to contact a manager to action the refund. Nothing happened.

I’ve made a SAR to get copies of the messages to provide as evidence for a Section 75 claim against the credit card company, but have been told that there are no emails pertaining to me (which is odd, because the complaints department has sent me emails).

My question is; if this was a bank, would any of these emails have been deleted?

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It sounds like they are saying they have the emails but don’t have to hand them over because they twist ‘personal data relating to’ for their convenience.

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To add my two pence here in my last job in another bank we were never told we couldn’t delete emails pertaining to a customers account or requesting permission to make an action but we did normally attach said emails onto the customers account, so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with deleting emails unless you’ve directly sent them with the company and they’re now denying they never existed.

Although I’m not sure whether any compliance people can weigh in on this?

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I would be amazed that if the emails even were ‘deleted’ by the user that they would not be retained by internal (and external) systems. Even Google Workplace offers this.

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I’d be frankly amazed if any email chain involving complaints was deleted in any company. From the companies point of view they need proof they tried to resolve things if it goes to small claims/ombudsman whatever is applicable. It’ll look really bad for them if they lie about that.

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Thanks for the helpful replies @TonyHoyle @_Tom @kolok @lpoolrob

The company seems badly run rather than shady so hopefully it’s just a cock up, but in any case I’ll contact the ICO next week as they’ve not complied with the SAR, and the FOS over the handling of the complaint.

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To mimic the above, it wouldn’t be easy to delete all traces, even if it’s not in someone’s mailboxes anywhere. IT will be able to fetch it if they were a decent company :sweat_smile:

MBNA did nothing by email, and I don’t think Lloyds do, being the same group as they stopped everyone’s external access, probably to prevent situations like this.

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