What does everyone think of Martin Lewis / MSE?

Agree completely that it shouldn’t affect how you’re dealt with, but in reality it does. Banks and other big businesses have been doing it wrong for years.

The point I’m trying to make is, if you act like you’re an individual and speak in your terms, it’s easier to treat you like one. If you act like a sheep and parrot someone else’s words, it’s easier to treat you like a sheep.

Banks and big businesses need to try harder and do things better (this goes way beyond treating people as an individual). But give them a little bit of help and you might be surprised about how they react.

As much as lovingly crafted prose can help in some situations (like say, I had a terminal illness or my child was missing) I find it hard to believe that good writing would be enough to sway an admin assistant to give me better treatment than the 10,000 other complaints they were dealing with. Especially when most of them are about something as dull as PPI.

I’d definitely be doing that for a small bank like Monzo, where they don’t have scripted phone procedures, fixed targets for handling calls and correspondence, but in a Barclays call centre, it seems unlikely it would produce any better outcome than a form letter.

I agree with you on the one hand, talking to individuals about individual feelings is inportant. Especially important for small businesses. But like you said, 2/3s of the complaints were upheld.

That’s thousands and thousands of policies. At some point you need to start treating it as a systemic problem instead of pretending it’s just one bad apple. The cart is overflowing.

I presume you work in financial services and are seeing it from that point of view?

From a consumer point of view, whether it’s a template letter, a web form, or a very personal from the heart confessional, it doesn’t feel like the outcome would be very different.

A bit like when years ago, I begged NatWest in person to stop charging me fees on my unplanned overdraft which had gone £50 overdrawn. “Computer says no” was their answer to making it an authorised one, and I didn’t manage to pay it off until it reached £850. That was some years ago, and would not be possible now given the fee charging limits they are now forced to keep to by legislation.

When it’s taken years, countless law changes and many court cases to force banks to act fairly, please execute my skeptism that writing a nicely written letter will have a positive result for the average customer.

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No I don’t work in financial services, quite the opposite in fact. I have the benefit of experience in seeing how big institutions deal with complaints. It sounds like your own personal experience has given you a very cynical view of the industry.

I am not defending the banking industry and the way they behave now or in the past or that deserving people shouldn’t be fairly compensated. Nor am I saying that if you show you understand the subject and how it applies to you that will guarantee anything.

What I am saying is that if you act in a confrontational way and throw some mud at the wall hoping something sticks, don’t be surprised with a defensive and vague response.

But anyway, we’re getting massively off topic and it’s clear we have very different viewpoints. I think we both agree that better financial literacy is a good thing. And given that this is a Monzo forum, I’m glad there are some players in the market who are trying to make banking straightforward and honest.

Template letters are precisely the opposite of vagueness - they are asking for specific redress for a specific problem in a precise way. They are an effective tool because of that.

But you’re right, we are off topic :blush:

I actually said the responses were vague. But never mind.
Template letters by their very nature are designed to be as wide as possible and therefore not specific or precise to an individual’s circumstances.

Here’s the template they quote for PPI. It’s actually a form provided by the ombudsman. Presumably for efficiency - they do have an awful lot of these complaints to get through.

http://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/publications/technical_notes/ppi/PPI-consumer-questionnaire.pdf

:joy: that’s not a template letter. That’s a questionnaire where you fill in your personal circumstances to show exactly how it applies to you, which is exactly my point.

Well, it was you who said you didn’t like the MSE template letters - they do have templates but most of them do have specific details which pertain directly to your circumstances. A template letter can be as personal as you like depending on how it is generated or written.

The PPI guide is thorough and comprehensive, and links to that form. They also now have a specific tool to make it easier too (resolver.co.uk).

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/reclaim/ppi-loan-insurance#templates

There you go again, proving my point. Anyone who knows enough to tailor a letter to their circumstances understands the problem and has taken on board the advice enough to educate themselves.

My problem is with templates where they say “send this to (insert name of company) and they will have to give you XYZ.”

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Sure, but I don’t see any of those letters here. Everything is interspersed with educational information about why you might be able to claim back PPI and in precisely what circumstances. Which template letters don’t you like exactly?

I did use one of their template letters once back in the days of when I didn’t pay for things and it did get me quite a lot of money back that I’d paid out in bank charges (or not paid out).

Obviously now I suffer the consequences of bad decisions but I’m in a significantly better position. The Energy and Credit clubs they offer do provide something of real value to people who would otherwise not have known.

I mean… as a nearly 30 year old who has no idea about ‘Money’, his website is saving my life currently.

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Agree - great man educating the consumer to seek better value. Keeps retailers on their toes.

Not sure you can eat at a chain restaurant without a voucher.

Don’t agree with templates - really everyone’s been miss sold???

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I’ve been using the site a lot over the past 2-4yrs.
It’s a great resource of consumer financial information. Like everything, it shouldn’t be taken as gospel and can have a bit of a shouty/tabloid feel. But that doesn’t take away from how useful it is in helping bring information to the masses.

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I find him to be extremely annoying and at times overly sensationalist.

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I find him extremely annoying too, and a bit of a hypocrite.

He sold MSE to MoneySuperMarket for £87million, plus every link to a product earns him / the website an affiliates payment, the earnings from which he isnt very transparent about.

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Next to all affliciate links, there is an asterisk. It’s not on every link. It also explains this at the bottom of the website and emails.

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It doesnt show how much they earn per referral link :slight_smile:

Enough to justify buying the site for £87 million

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If anyone is interested, I have found this webpage: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/site/moneysavingexpert-finance/

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