The Competition Commission delivered its final report on its remedies for the PPI market on 29 January 2009. The Competition Commission was asked to investigate the PPI market after a referral from the Office of Fair Trading in February 2007.

These new measures will have a significant impact on retailers and dealers when they come into force in October 2010.  Briefly the new legislation will mean:

• Single premium PPI products will be banned
• Customers will be able to purchase a PPI policy on their own initiative 24 hours after the credit sale
• The dealer will not be able to complete a PPI sale until 7 days after the sale of the underlying credit product

Options for the dealer?
Other than stopping selling PPI altogether the dealer will only have two choices, either:
• Try to affect the sale in house 7 days after the credit agreement has been put into force or;
• Use a third party specialist to follow up the customer and sell a PPI policy

Aaron Burton from FISC™ explains ‘Whatever the dealer decides to do they will need a system to help and assist. For those continue selling directly, FSA Tracker™ will track the customer’s requirements, allowing the sales team to contact the customer at the relevant time, and will provide the tools necessary to compliantly sell PPI.  Where a third party is used, FSA Tracker™ will record all the customer’s details in a format which can easily be swept, and our new Call Centre version can offer full configurable sales scripts to make the task easy and keep them on the right side of the law’.
A full copy of the Competition Commissions findings can be found at http://www.competition-commission.org.uk/press_rel/2009/jan/pdf/04-09.pdf