Consumers rushing to meet the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) deadline to submit complaints about payment protection insurance (PPI) have encountered crashing websites and long waits to reach banks by phone, according to reports.
The August 29 deadline has come and gone, but many customers have taken to social media to complain about receiving an “internal server error” message when trying to access their bank’s portal before the cut-off. Among the banks impacted was Santander, which reported a “brief technical issue” yesterday morning.
“If any customer has been unable to submit a claim due to the issue, we will ensure that their claim is considered, even if it is submitted after the deadline,” Santander told BBC News.
Meanwhile, The Co-operative Bank told The Guardian that its online PPI form was “intermittently unavailable between 1:15pm and 2:45pm [yesterday] due to a technical issue” and that it was continuing to monitor the availability of the form.
Customers have also reported long waits to reach banks by phone, with one Twitter user asking the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS): “Why isn’t PPI number working!!!! #Dodgy.”
The FCA acknowledged the issue in a statement to The Guardian, saying “where a firm knows that customers may have had trouble accessing their services (whether website or phone)… then we would expect them to apply a pragmatic approach to dealing with complaints received immediately after the deadline.”
