Customer Agreement stage one: Initial registration
Before you bring your complaint to the BBRS:
Please note that:
- if your complaint is eligible for the Financial Ombudsman Service, you must take your complaint to them, and you may come up against their six-month time limit for doing so – if this might affect you, please contact us
- you may need to think about legal time limits too (for example, if you want to bring legal action, generally you must do so within 6 years after the problem arose). If you’re not clear what this might mean for you, please ask us and we’ll try to help.
- our service has been designed so that you do not have to use any professional assistance (e.g. an accountant, lawyer, etc.) to bring your case (or cases) to us. This means you will not be able to recover any costs you incur by using your own advisers unless we have approved such expenses in advance.
Also please remember that, for us to be able to deal with your complaint:
- you must have already made that complaint to your bank, and either have received a response from them, or have waited a reasonable time but not received one;
- your complaint must not already have been dealt with by the Financial Ombudsman Service, nor be eligible for that service;
- you must not be in, or have obtained any ruling from, any court proceedings with your bank about your complaint; and
- you have to meet our eligibility criteria
Once you have registered your case, and we start work on it, you will be allocated one of our customer champions who – free of charge – will guide and support you through our process. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please contact our team who will be happy to help.
Before we can look at your complaint, we need you to agree to certain terms and conditions set out below.
Personal data
You agree with the BBRS that:
- you have read and understood our Privacy Policy which sets out how your personal data, and that of other people whose personal data you provide to us, will be processed for the purpose of dealing with your case and you acknowledge that this may include us passing such personal data to your bank where that is necessary to deal with your case.
- you will comply with all applicable data protection laws when sharing personal data with us.
- in particular, you will not give us any personal data about anybody else (including their email addresses, phone numbers – and especially not sensitive personal data such as their financial position or state of health) unless you have processed their data lawfully, and have their permission or another legal basis to do so in accordance with data protection laws. If you do have such permission, we will need to see it.
- all the information you provide to the BBRS is accurate to the best of your knowledge.
- the BBRS and your bank may rely on these agreements by you.
Your agreement with the BBRS
This is an agreement between your business and the BBRS. When we use the words “we”, “us” and “our”, we mean the BBRS. “You” and “your” refer to the business whose complaint we are going to look at. When we start looking at a complaint, we will check that there is one person properly authorised by the business to bring it to the BBRS.
You agree with the BBRS that:
Good faith
- you will act reasonably at all times and in good faith;
Explaining and evidencing your complaint
- you will:
- explain your complaint in your own words to us, including what you would like us to do about it
- provide (where necessary with help from the customer champion) any copies of previous correspondence with your bank and copies of any documents you consider relevant to your complaint;
- when we ask you to provide evidence, you must provide it (if you have it) within a reasonable time set by us;
Obtaining information from, and sharing information with, your bank
- we can contact your bank to ask for relevant personal and confidential information about you.
- your bank can release such information to us.
- we can share with your bank relevant information you give us.
Confidentiality
- For the purposes of this agreement, all information, evidence or documents that you receive from us during the process of dealing with your complaint, whether it is from the bank or anyone else, is confidential information.
- You must keep confidential information confidential at all times, and must only use it for the purposes of the BBRS dealing with your complaint
- You must not publish or disclose any part of any confidential information, but you may discuss your case and any confidential information you receive with any person advising or representing you when bringing your complaint to us, but the same rules about confidentiality will apply to that person too.
- Your obligation of confidentiality applies to you at all times while the BBRS is dealing with your complaint, and will continue after the BBRS stops dealing with it for whatever reason, but you may use confidential information:
- if you are required to do so by law, or
- to enforce a BBRS determination in a court, or
- for the purposes of any other legal proceedings between you and the bank in relation to the subject matter of your complaint
- We may publish, for the purpose of informing the public about the nature of our work and likely users of the scheme about our approach:
- aggregate or thematic data about Complaints or their outcomes; or
- summaries of Determinations or Final Determinations, provided that the names of all of the parties to the Complaint, and all of the individuals referenced in the Determination or Final Determination, are anonymised and (to the extent relevant) any other personal data relating to any individual is removed.
No liability
- The BBRS, including any organisation working on its behalf, will not be liable to you in damages for anything it does in the course of dealing with your complaint, unless you can show that we acted in bad faith;
- No individual, including our Chief Adjudicator, any other staff member of the BBRS or any organisation working on our behalf will be liable to you in damages or otherwise for anything done in the course of dealing with your complaint.
No defamation
- BBRS proceedings will be treated the same as court proceedings for the purpose of defamation law. In other words, no-one will be liable in defamation for things said or written during the course of our dealing with your complaint.
BBRS can stop dealing with your complaint
- if at any time whilst we are dealing with your complaint, you break any of the above agreements you have made with us, or behave in an abusive or threatening way to anyone at the BBRS or working on our behalf, we may stop considering your case;
Further terms and conditions later
- as your complaint progresses through our process, we will ask you to agree to further terms and conditions as they become relevant.
You can withdraw your case at any point during the BBRS process – just let us know.
If you withdraw, or your complaint comes to an end for some other reason, most of this agreement will no longer apply to you.
However, the following parts of this agreement will continue to apply even after you have finished dealing with the BBRS:
- those relating to handling of your personal data
- confidentiality
- no liability
- no defamation
| Click here to confirm you have read, understood and agree with all the above and that you would like us to proceed with your case. |
A copy of this agreement will be stored in your case file with the BBRS so you will be able to refer to it all times as we deal with your complaint.
