Business sells high-risk product to ‘low risk’ customer

A customer was sold a product which she felt did not match her attitude to risk. We agreed.

What happened

Nisha, a low risk investor, approached a financial business to invest in a product that wasn’t likely to drop much in value and didn’t require her to pay to access it at short notice.

The only products the company had available to sell at the time all involved taking some risk.

How we helped

When she came to us with a complaint about her investment, we looked at Nisha’s circumstances and found that she didn’t have the capacity to take much risk at all and only had a relatively small amount of ‘rainy day’ money put aside.

It might just have been best to put the money in a bank account paying a reasonable rate of interest, but this might not have been part of the business’ product range.

The business concluded that as they considered Nisha low risk, they would offer her one of their savings plans with a tie-in period, but select the lowest risk of the funds available.

Putting things right

We found that there was no facility for the customer and adviser to discuss options, other than accepting some investment risk. We decided that this product was missold to Nisha and asked the business to repay her.

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