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You’d have to know the person and be following them on instagram.
There was nothing in it that gave away what the meeting earlier was about, but it was a video of a band playing in the office with lots of staff dancing g and enjoying themselves.
Jimmy - why did the FOS go from upholding almost no amigo complaints to upholding 80%+?
You've previously said the goal posts were never moved, but Amigo would have always had affordability complaints and they were never upheld by FOS. You've claimed that it was some kind of irresponsible ramping up of the loan book before the IPO, but the FOS are now upholding old affordability complaints from before that period at the same rate, from what I've seen (and from what your Debt Camel website suggests).
There quite clearly was a change in approach from the FOS. They started upholding rules that didn't even exist and from reading some of the founders tweets last year, it really does seem that rules were made up and applied retrospectively.
It just doesn't seem reasonable to do that a year after a privately owned company has just become a publicly owned one. Once over a billion £ of public money was invested, based on factors which would have surely included their previously market leading low uphold rate in FOS complaints.
I know that my investment was made with the knowledge that Amigo had been through several audits from the regulator, with almost no requirements put on them, and their full FCA application had just been approved and the FOS didn't seem to ever hold up any complaints against them and when they did it appeared to be individual errors, not systemic ones.
Your black and white analysis of the situation isn't fair.
Also, you keep saying "Amigo has even accepted what it did was wrong" but even that is a bit ridiculous. They kind of have to say that if they're going down the route they are.
I feel like they should have taken the judicial review route tbh. Although I admit I didn't at the time it was being discussed.
They were vulnerable to challenge imo.
The previous majority shareholder/founder wanted to take the fos decisions to judicial review, because he felt they would win, for the reasons mentioned above.
I’m not sure if you’ve heard of debt camel, Jimmy, but go and read some of the stories on there. There are huge numbers of customers who weren’t lent to irresponsibly being coached through how to get out of their responsibilities and liabilities by playing the affordability card.
The owner of the website just parrots what you’re saying, funnily enough, telling anyone that claims they’re unaffordable to make a claim, even when their story doesn’t amount to evidence of them being unaffordable.
Jimmy, I’d love to arrange a phone call so we can discuss exactly what it is you think amigo did in the past that is so bad.
At the time these ‘mistakes’ were made, the fca knew exactly what their risk process was and exactly how they were assessing affordability, and approved them for fca authorisation. They had also previously been through a section 166 audit, less than a year before authorisation, and a thematic review into their industry around the same time.
It was the fos who later changed their stance on complaint handling and starting upholding complaints they had never previously upheld. All shortly after amigo had pulled off a £1.4bn IPO, with various pension funds, and private investors, investing in the company, no doubt partly due to their almost unblemished record with both the FCA and FOS. Their complaint uphold rate with the fos previously was ridiculously low. The ombudsman nearly always ruled in their favour, until one day this changed, almost over night, without the regulator (fca) changing their rules in any way.
How can’t you see that this was incredibly strange behaviour?
You can see the sections they've been debating/arguing over in the report as they've not changed the bloody font back to match the rest.
May seem like a little thing, but they've had 6 months to get this right. It's Amateur.