A bank and solicitors disagree on account access and an enduring power of attorney being registered with Office of the Public Guardian.
What happened
Arben completed an enduring power of attorney (ePOA) naming his solicitors as his attorney. However, when he started to lose mental capacity 15 years later, he didn’t register his ePOA with the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG).
Arben’s solicitors sent the ePOA to the OPG and asked Arben’s bank to let it act on his behalf while the ePOA was being registered.
The bank refused to give the solicitors full access to the account until the OPG had registered the ePOA. It also cancelled Arben’s online banking access, his bank card and all the direct debit instructions he’d set up.
But it agreed to honour requests for payments where Arben’s solicitors had provided evidence that showed they were for Arben’s benefit.
The solicitors still felt they should have full and immediate access to Arben’s account after giving the bank the unregistered ePOA. They made a complaint to the bank and, unhappy with its response, came to us.
What we said
To comply with our rules, we couldn’t look into the complaint until the ePOA was registered with the OPG. We needed to see the registered document to be satisfied that the solicitors were authorised to bring a complaint on Arben’s behalf.
We explained this to Arben’s solicitors and only began to investigate after the registration.
We thought it was possible that Arben’s circumstances and wishes could have changed since he completed his ePOA more than 15 years earlier. The solicitors also mentioned that one of the two named attorneys no longer worked for their firm and had refused to act as Arben’s attorney.
The bank had a duty to act on Arben’s instructions and to protect his accounts. So we thought it was fair to wait for the OPG to finish registering the ePOA before giving Arben’s solicitors access to his account.
And we were pleased to see that while waiting, the bank had made an informal arrangement to accept some, properly evidenced, payment requests. This enabled the solicitors to ensure Arben’s care home fees were paid.
We thought this was fair in the circumstances, so we didn’t uphold the complaint.