IMHO to rank banks on treatment of arrears customers

The Irish Mortgage Holders Organisation, which assists those in arrears with their home loans, is planning to publish a ranking of banks according to how they treat customers who have fallen into arrears with their payments.

IMHO director and co-founder David Hall told The Irish Times that the results will be based on its experience in negotiating 2,536 deals for mortgage arrears customers, and assisting with about 100 bankruptcy cases and 115 personal insolvencies over the past year.

It will rank the banks and other financial groups under various headings, including their compliance with the code of conduct on mortgage arrears, their engagement with customers, the solutions offered, and their behaviour in terms of threatening a legal process or repossession.

He expects to publish the results by the end of January and is planning to conduct a similar survey for buy-to-let mortgages in February.

First of its kind

Mr Hall believes the survey is the first of its kind and will rank the behaviour of the main lenders –

AIB

,

Bank of Ireland

, KBC,

Ulster Bank

and

Permanent TSB

– some subprime lenders, including Start Mortgages and Stepstone, and some of the groups who have acquired loan portfolios or are managing these mortgages, such as Pepper Asset Servicing.

“I don’t believe that anything like this has ever been done before . . . certainly not in the thousands,” he said.

Mr Hall accepted that this will be a subjective ranking by the IMHO. “It will be based on our experience . . . on evidence of deals done and deals rejected.”

The IMHO has service agreements with AIB and KBC to act as an honest broker between the banks and their arrears customers but Mr Hall said these arrangements would not colour its rankings.

The IMHO has also issued a survey to about 4,000 people, asking them to detail when they got into financial difficulty and to detail certain elements of their engagement with lenders.