Lisa had a credit card which she used to regularly make purchases on. One day, Lisa received a reminder that she had not paid her credit card bill and realised she had been making payments to the wrong account with a similar name. As a result, Lisa was charged interest and fees.
Lisa contacted the credit card company to notify them of the error and requested that her account be closed.
She was concerned the credit card company had held onto her funds for a month before reallocating them to the right account. The credit card company did not contact her about the mistake until she phoned them. Lisa also complained about the service and difficulties with logging into her account to view her statement. Lisa wondered how many more people had been similarly affected.
The credit card company apologised to Lisa for their service and for putting the funds in a holding queue for a month, noting it was working on improving their timeframes. The credit card company advised her it had made some changes to how they search for payments following Lisa’s advice. The credit card company also refunded Lisa the overpayments, account fees and interest charges.
However, Lisa wanted improvements made to the credit card company’s service and referred her complaint to FSCL.
Review
Upon review, we did not think we could assist Lisa any further as the credit card company had made Lisa a reasonable settlement offer by compensating her the account fees, the interest charges and apologising.
While we understood that Lisa was concerned about the delay and service she received, we noted that the credit card company had compensated Lisa $50 for the inconvenience. Further, Lisa had not suffered any financial loss as a result of transferring her money to the incorrect account.
Outcome
We told Lisa that it was unlikely that we would find that the credit card company should compensate her any more than they already had for the stress and inconvenience.
Lisa agreed to withdraw her complaint. We also recommended to the credit card company that they amend their bank account names so as to avoid further confusion for customers.
Insights for the complainant
FSCL is a dispute resolution scheme, and our powers are compensatory rather than disciplinary or punitive in nature.
