Тема форума | 15/02/2015 - 00:58

Can you name an area of financial services that hasn't been found wanting, where consumers haven't been sold an overly complicated product for an inflated price, or traders haven't colluded so they can boost profits?

It is the question that Martin Wheatley, the watchdog appointed a year ago to police everything from insurance policies to foreign exchange trading, takes longest to answer in our meeting.

"An awful lot of the problem was that products were being supplied that weren't necessarily ripping off the consumer but they were being under-priced to the extent that they weren't making enough profit for the bank," he says, eventually - https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&q=eventually .
Sliding the milk jug across the table until it clinks against his cup of tea, Mr Wheatley adds: "So the bank would say: OK, you want that product, you have to take that one with it. That's what payment protection was."

In 12 months, the Financial Conduct Authority, where Mr Wheatley is chief executive, has made its presence felt, weighing into annuities, mobile-phone insurance - "in some places, practices were abhorrent" - interest-only mortgages, Libor interest-rate rigging and payday lending.
"It is a long food chain, with reasonable behaviour at one end and appalling at the other."
The dubious bundling of products was alive and well in the small-business loans market too, where banks have so far paid out

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