Barclays Bank Error In Your Favour - Collect £100M

I see that Barclays is fond of playing Monopoly, and has managed to create a bank error (for once in its customers' favour) that will entail a refund to affected customers (estimated at being around 300,000) of around £100M.

Barclays customers are to receive compensation because it miscalculated the interest owed on personal loans, the errors date back to October 2008.

Other divisions (Barclaycard, Barclays Wealth and Barclays Corporate) are now undertaking a review to see if customers were short-changed by the errors ("technical documentary errors").

Barclays will write to customers in the coming weeks. Barclays is quoted by the Telegraph saying that said it had "identified certain issues with the information contained in historic statements and arrears notices relating to consumer loan accounts. It is therefore implementing a plan to return interest incorrectly charged to customers".

A spokesman for the bank said:

"Barclays has proactively reviewed information it has historically sent to its customers relating to interest charges, where we have found technical documentary errors. As a result Barclays has identified certain issues with the information contained in some statements and arrears notices relating to consumer loan accounts. 

Due to these notification errors, interest was not due on certain accounts during the period that Barclays made this mistake, and whilst no one has been mis-sold to, customers are entitled to have their interest payments returned. No customer will pay more than they were ever contractually expected to. 

Barclays has notified the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), which is responsible for consumer credit issues, and is implementing a plan to return interest payments to customers as swiftly and efficiently as possible. Barclays is undertaking a review of all its businesses where similar issues could arise to assess any related issues. 

Any affected customer will be contacted by Barclays and customers do not need to take any action."

To add to Barclays shame, campaign group Move Your Money said that Barclays was the lowest scoring financial institution out of 70 assessed, scoring four out of 100 possible points for honesty and customer service.

Well done Barclays!