FSA Orders Banks to Pay for 'Swap' Mis-Selling -- Finspreads

LONDON--(Marketwire - Feb 1, 2013) - Finspreads: Four banks have been told by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) to compensate thousands of small businesses for mis-selling complicated insurance deals.

The FSA found that 90 per cent of the deals sold to smaller clients broke at least one rule.

Around 40,000 "interest rate hedging products" (IRHPs) have been sold to such clients since 2001.

The decision to order banks to deliver compensation was made last summer.

The FSA has told the four big banks involved to work out how much their customers lost.

But the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has already expressed concern about how payments to the banks have not been automatically suspended, with there seeming to be no clear way for businesses to appeal if refused compensation.

It comes on a sluggish day of trading in London for some of Britain's biggest banks.

At 1449GMT on the FTSE 100 Barclays, HSBC, and the Royal Bank of Scotland all made declines of 1.49, 0.58, and 2.19 per cent respectively.

Learn more about spread betting strategies and the FTSE 100 index at Finspreads.

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We pioneered browser-based spread betting in the UK in 1999 by being the first provider in the industry to offer real time spread betting access via your browser. Since then, we have grown to become one of the biggest online spread betting firms in the UK.

We offer 24-hour prices on thousands of global instruments and introduced the first browser-based spread betting platform in the UK in 1999.

Acquired by City Index in 2006, we have benefited from the wide range of technological innovations at City Index to enhance the user experience and trading potential of our spread betting clients, such as mobile trading apps as well as powerful desktop trading tools and charts via our Advantage Web platform.

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