What Amount Could You Be Claiming Back In Bank Fees? Background To Reclaiming My Bank Charges

Basically, you can reclaim unfair bank charges you have incurred within the previous 6 years. This includes excessive fees for being overdrawn, letters informing you about bounced cheques and failed direct debits and the likes. If the action was likely to have only cost the bank a small amount and they have charged you significantly more, then there’s a chance of a reclaim. If these fees have caused you to incur further charges or interest, then you will also have a case there.

As well as these, you can reclaim for interest on the amount you are claiming – the interest you would have earned on the money had it been in your account.

But how should you find how much the bank has charged you?

First, if you can refer to your bank statements for the past 6 years then you just need to go through them. If you haven’t kept them all, if you are registered for online banking (or can register) then you may be able to determine the fees from there.

Finally, if none of these are possible then you have to go to your bank. Asking for copies of back statements can prove quite costly (and these charges DO NOT count as excessive!!!). But if you know exact dates of charges, then this might be not too expensive. But the other way is to write to the bank, quoting the Data Protection Act 1998, asking them to tell you for all charges on the account:

? what the offence was

? the date of the offence / fee

? the amount of the fee

The bank has, by law, only 40 working days to answer your request. But it is allowed to charge you a fee of up to ?10, so it is worth while including in this letter the full ?10 fee made payable to the bank.

If your bank tries to send you a copy of your statements they can try to charge you for that. To prevent this, ensure that you tell the bank you are using the Data Protection Act 1998 to get a list of all charges.

Expenses

You can also claim expenses incurred in making your reclaim, although this can be best left in case the claim gets as far as the court stage and then used as a bargaining tool to stop that. Simply put, if the bank see that you will accept repayment now, or repayment plus costs if they don’t accept that, then there’s a financial incentive to them to settle.

Reasonable fees include court fees and a case has also included costs of preparing the case. To reclaim this, make a record of how much time you spend preparing your case then include a charge at ?9.25 per hour (the legal entitlement).

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Technorati Tags: Banking Services, Data Protection Act, online banking

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