Vehicle finance commission complaints – information for customers

At this stage, we can’t comment on any potential compensation customers may be entitled to. What we do know is on 11 January 2024, the FCA announced that they’re going to undertake work in the motor finance market. 

The FCA will begin consulting on a potential compensation scheme in October 2025. Once this is complete, the FCA will decide upon next steps and if the scheme goes ahead, payments to customers are expected to begin in 2026.  

You can find out more about the FCA’s work on their website, which is https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers/car-finance-complaints

Normally, we have to provide a response to your complaint within eight weeks or let you know that we need longer. 

The FCA paused the requirement to respond to discretionary commission arrangement complaints while they undertake their review and decide what action, if any, will be required by firms for these complaints. 

The pause is currently due to end 4 December 2025.

If you submit a relevant complaint, you’ll have to wait until after the pause has ended for a final response. The FCA has taken this step to make sure complaints are dealt with consistently by all motor finance providers. 

We’re sorry for the delay. We’re currently dealing with a high volume of enquiries about discretionary commission arrangements, and we’re checking each case thoroughly. It may take us longer than usual to respond to some customers.

If you had a discretionary commission arrangement and received your final response letter between 12 July 2023 and 10 January 2024: 
You now have the right to refer your complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), free of charge within 15 months of the date of your Final Response letter.

If you had a non-discretionary commission arrangement and received your Final Response letter between 21 June 2024 and 19 December 2024:
You now have the right to refer your complaint to the FOS, free of charge on or before 29 July 2026.

These are an extension to the usual six months which the FCA have introduced to allow them time to complete their review into the historical use of commission arrangements in the motor finance industry.

Find information about services from the Financial Ombudsman Service.

Our automated process for matching and verifying the identity of our customers compares the information you submit against data held in our systems at the point your agreement ended.  If the information you provide doesn’t match our records, we won’t be able to find your agreement.

Common reasons for this include:

• If you’ve moved house and the address provided is not the same address we held at the time your agreement ended.
• If the complaint is not brought by a customer named on the account, for example on behalf of a relative.
• If your agreement was taken out more than six years ago, we’re far more likely to find it if you provide the agreement number. 
• If you’ve changed your name and it’s not the same as what we had recorded at the time your agreement ended.
• If the agreement you had was with another part of Close Brothers, and unrelated to motor finance. For example, Close Brothers Premium Finance fund vehicle insurance policies.

To be able to confidently match your complaint with a historical finance agreement we need the following information:

Agreement number OR vehicle registration
Date of birth
Full name (as at the end of your agreement)
Address and postcode (as at the end of your agreement)
 

The extension to the pause is to give the FCA enough time to analyse the data they’re collecting from vehicle finance lenders and to assess the outcome of several legal cases on this matter. The FCA’s next steps will be consulting on a customer compensation scheme which will take time to plan for and carry out, beginning in October 2025.

When the Financial Conduct Authority announced their review into motor finance commissions on 11 January 2024, we had to act quickly to start matching enquiries to our records. We help over 100,000 new customers each year, so we’ve had to work harder and smarter to match information we hold to an increased number of enquiries about commission.

Unfortunately, this means that some customers have been told that we couldn’t find them initially. Since then, we’ve been continually improving how we match commission enquiries to records we hold and are now able to match records to customers that we weren’t able to previously. If we’ve now matched your details to an agreement that included a commission payment, you should have an email from us which explains any next steps. Any complaints about commission will be paused until 4 December 2025.

If you’ve submitted multiple enquiries about the same agreement, we’ll investigate the one that arrived with us first and treat the rest as duplicates. We won’t do this if you're enquiring about different agreements, as these will be reviewed separately and logged as separate complaints if eligible.

Due to our data protection policies, we may need to redact customer information, and we can’t keep your data longer than needed. This means we might not be able to find all historical customer details in our systems.