NS&I customer complaints upheld double in one year

Savers with some of the very first National Savings and Investments Premium Bonds have won Ombudsman cases as the number of successful customer complaints doubled in 2020.

A woman with a 1960 Premium Bond was told she was never the rightful owner, while another customer saw NS&I remove his late grandmother’s Premium Bond and ordered him to pay back £2,500 in prize money.

The cases show how easily mistakes can creep in when dealing with a savings product as old as Premium Bonds, which were first introduced as paper certificates in 1956.

But these grievances are also part of a broader trend of complaints against NS&I that will see the number of customer cases confirmed by the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) more than double by 2022.

In 2022, 31 FOS cases against NS&I were upheld, compared to 14 in 2021 and only 3 in 2020.

In one case last year, a woman who owned one of the very first Premium Bonds, issued in 1960, was told by NS&I that she was not the rightful owner – despite possessing a physical paper copy of the bond.

The woman, identified only as Mrs B by the FOS, discovered that one of her 83 Premium Bonds had mysteriously disappeared.

When she checked with NS&I, she was told that the bond no longer existed and had been collected by another customer in 1998.

>> How long does it take to cash out of Premium Bonds?

But Mrs B was adamant she was the rightful owner of the bond and still had a paper copy of it from 1960 to prove it.

So she turned to the FOS, which ruled that NS&I had indeed made a mistake – but in 1960, when Mrs. B had first bought the bond.

The woman had paid for the bond exchange and the square, but was actually given bond certificate from another client due to an NS&I clerk’s error.

The certificate for the bond she bought is still lost, but at the time the original customer of the disputed bond had cashed it in, leaving Mrs. B with a Premium Bond certificate – but no bond to back it.

That went unnoticed by either side until more than six decades later, and the FOS has asked NS&I to pay the woman £100 in damages.

‘NS&I has removed my grandmother’s Premium Bond from the 1960s’

In another case, a man inherited a 1963 Premium Bond from his grandmother, which NS&I told him won £2,800 in prizes.

But years later, NS&I asked him to pay back most of the prize money before canceling his bonds and closing his account.

The man, Mr. G., received a Premium Bond in August 2016 that was purchased by him deceased grandmother in 1963.

Mr G then spoke to NS&I to see if the bond had won any prices – and was told it had won as much as £2,800.

Delighted, the man cashed in £2,500 and left £301 on the bill.

But four years later in 2020, NS&I wrote to the man and said £2,499 of the £2,500 prize money actually belonged to another customer, not him, by mistake.

NS&I asked him to refund the money and closed his account with the £301 still in it.

The FOS said the man had caused “avoidable suffering as a result of NS&I’s mistake.”

The Ombudsman ordered NS&I to repay Mr G £175 in addition to the £75 already awarded to him, and to have his account reopened with his grandmother’s original Premium Bond.

An NS&I spokesperson said: ‘We always strive for the highest level of customer service and will always investigate complaints where we may have fallen below our usual high standards.

“Customers also have the right to submit their complaint to the impartial FOS, who will review all available evidence and reach a decision they believe is fair to both parties. While we are disappointed when a customer chooses to bring their case to FOS, we will always respect the ruling they make.”

Previous NS&I customer service issues

NS&I is the nation’s largest savings company, so you’d expect it to land a few complaints.

But the savings company scores an average of 1.2 stars out of 5 on the review website TrustPilot, with most complaints focusing on login problems and customer service.

Last September, hundreds of NS&I customers lost access to their accounts due to the new online login system.