FCA fines and enforcement actions in 2020

In December 2020 the FCA fined Barclays Bank UK, Barclays Bank and Clydesdale Financial Services a combined £26,056,400 for the poor treatment of consumer credit customers who fell behind on repayments or got into financial difficulty between April 2014 and December 2018. Barclays failed to have proper conversations with struggling customers to understand why they were in arrears, did not properly assess their circumstances, and as a result offered repayment plans that were unaffordable or unsustainable — breaching the FCA's rules requiring firms to treat customers fairly and to organise their affairs responsibly. Barclays had already identified around 1.5 million affected customer accounts and paid them more than £273 million in redress. It did not dispute the findings and settled for a 30% discount, without which the fine would have been £37,223,500.

On 11 June 2020 the FCA fined Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland and The Mortgage Business — all part of Lloyds Banking Group — £64,046,800 for their handling of mortgage customers who fell into arrears between April 2011 and December 2015. The banks' systems and procedures meant call handlers often did not gather enough information about a customer's finances to judge what they could actually afford, so repayment arrangements were set that were unrealistic and risked making customers' difficulties worse. Around 526,000 customers had already received about £300 million under a redress scheme the group set up in 2017. The banks did not dispute the findings and qualified for a 30% discount; the fine would otherwise have been £91,495,400, and at the time it was the largest FCA penalty on a high street lender since 2015.