RBS and NatWest are fined £2.8m

The RBS group has ‘acknowledged’ its failings

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and its NatWest subsidiary have been fined £2.8m for failing to deal properly with customers’ routine complaints.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA), which imposed the fine, said there was an “unacceptably high risk” that the customers had been treated unfairly.

The banks’ main failings were delays, shoddy investigations and inadequate explanations.

RBS acknowledged its complaints handling had been poor.

“We recognise the importance of complaint handling for our customers and are focused on addressing the root causes of complaints,” said Brian Hartzer of RBS.

The poor performance of the RBS and NatWest staff came to light in the autumn of 2009 when the FSA was investigating the way all the UK’s main banks had been dealing with complaints.

It found problems with more than half of those it examined at RBS and NatWest.

For instance, in 62% of cases the complaints were not dealt with in time and the customers had not been told they could go to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) if they were still dissatisfied.

The FSA said the blame lay with poor training and guidance for the bank staff assigned to dealing with complaints, and inadequate monitoring of their work by managers.

“We expect firms to treat customers fairly and that consumers can be confident that their complaints will be dealt with properly,” said Margaret Cole, the FSA’s managing director of enforcement and financial crime.

“The review showed that banks need to make major changes to handle consumer complaints fairly and the FSA will continue to take appropriate action to ensure these changes are put in place,” she added.

The FSA pointed out it had only examined the way routine complaints were dealt with.

Its findings did not cover complaints about the mis-selling of payment protection insurance, or bank overdraft fees, which have generated hundreds of thousands of complaints to the major banks in the past few years.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.