Diary of an Icesave Customer (Part 3)

The Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) last week began making payments to UK customers of Icesave. By the close of play Fiday 14th November, payments to the value of £0.25bn had begun.

The FSCS invited Icesave customers, during a low volume trial, to reclaim their money through their accelerated online claims process. This process, testing suggests, can be done in less than 4 minutes, and very few users required telephone assistance.

With the FSCS rolling it out further, more and more people should now receive an email inviting them to follow the process and initiate their claim.

FSCS Chief Executive Loretta Minghella: "Five weeks ago a lot of Icesave savers were worried that they were going to be left high and dry. Now they can be confident that the electronic process is underway and people are getting their money back. We have already transmitted about £0.25bn after starting the process last weekend. FSCS is keen to make the process as smooth as possible for Icesave's customers; to this end we started by processing -a low volume of claims and are ramping up. This allows us to learn from the experience of people going through the online process, to answer any questions they have and to respond to any issues.

"We are delighted to report that the initial phase, which involved offering compensation to over 10,000 Icesave customers, has gone well. The majority of those offered have already completed their part of the online process, and the first customers to be paid out received their compensation by BACS transfer yesterday.  This honours our commitment to commence payments in the second week of November, and we remain on track to offer compensation to the vast majority of Icesave customers in November.”

UK Icesave customers who have chosen not to use the online payout are still be able to claim compensation using a paper-based application process. Application forms will start going out next week to about 16,000 Icesave customers who did not have