We look at William’s complaint after his lender accidentally switched his mortgage from repayment to interest-only.
What happened
William’s lender accidentally switched his mortgage from repayment to interest-only. However, when William contacted the lender to let them know, they said the repayment mortgage was still in place and that the payments were correct.
The lender sent William annual statements showing that he had an interest-only mortgage. William didn’t question this until he was approaching the end of the mortgage term, five years after the interest-only statements started arriving. At that point, his balance was too high to complete the mortgage within the term.
The lender accepted they’d made the original mistake and met the underfunding for the first two years following the error. But the statements were clear and William hadn’t questioned why they showed his mortgage was still interest-only, or why his balance wasn’t reducing.
What we said
We thought that it was reasonable to have expected William to have made further enquiries, and that two years seemed a reasonable period. So we didn’t tell the lender to pay any more.