Complaints

The best way to contact us is by phone so that we can talk to you in person. Please call us on 0800 092 3300.

Please have your Personal Access Code (PAC) when you call us. If you don't have a PAC, or have forgotten it, please call us.

There are other ways to make a complaint:

If you're an existing customer you can fill out our online form.

Email: service@caterallen.co.uk

You can write to us:

Client Team
Cater Allen Private Bank
Cater Allen Operations
Sunderland
SR43 4FB

We want to fully understand what's gone wrong. We'll need some information to make sure the right person deals with your complaint in the best way.

Please include:

• your name and address
• your account details
• a description of your complaint and how it's affected you
• when the issue happened
• your contact number, or your preferred method of contact
• the best time to contact you.

This means we can contact you easily to talk about your problem. Calls from us may show as unknown or withheld numbers.

Using third party firm to make a complaint

If you use a third party to make your complaint, such as a solicitor, claims management company or financial adviser, we'll still investigate your issue in the same way to the best we can.

A few things to note:

• we won't charge you to investigate your complaint
• we aren't liable for any fees that a third party might charge you
• if the result of the complaint includes a money award, we'll send that to you as our customer.

We'll do everything we can to resolve your concern. If we need more information to investigate, we'll contact you using the details we've listed above.

If we can resolve your complaint within 3 business days, we'll formally let you know, and tell you about the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS).

For complex issues we may need more time to investigate your concerns. If this is the case, we'll send you an acknowledgment letter telling you the next steps.

Once we've done a detailed investigation, we'll give you a final response. This will tell you the details of what we did, how we reached our decision, and how we're going to improve.

We try to resolve all complaints as quickly as possible, and specific time frames apply to certain types of complaints:

Complaints relating to payments in or out of your account:

• we'll let you know our final decision as soon as we've finished our investigation. We have 15 days to resolve these complaints
• in exceptional circumstances it could take us longer than 15 days to investigate your complaint. But all complaints will be resolved in 35 days. We'll write to you to let you know if we need longer than 15 days. We'll also let you know how to refer the matter the Financial Ombudsman if you don't want to wait for us to finish investigating.

All other complaints:

• although we have 56 days to resolve your complaint, we'll send you our final response as soon as we've completed our investigation
• we'll also keep you informed in writing along the way
• If we haven't been able to finalise our investigation by 56 days, we'll send you a letter to let you know. It'll tell you what steps to take. One option is to approach the Financial Ombudsman if you'd rather not wait for us to finalise our investigation.

If you don't agree with our resolution of your complaint and you'd like to take it further, you can ask the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) to look into it. This is a free, independent, and impartial service that helps resolve disputes.

Although you can refer your complaint to the FOS at any time, they'll ask for our permission to investigate complaints where:

• you haven't complained to us first, to give us the chance to put things right
• You have complained to us, but we haven't given you our final response yet and we're still -within our timescales.

We'll send you the full details of our final response decision, including your right to refer your complaint to the FOS. If you do that, it should be within 6 months of the date on our final response.

Web: www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk
Email: complaint.info@financial-ombudsman.org.uk
Phone: 0800 0 234 567 (free from UK landlines and mobiles)
Post: Financial Ombudsman Service, Exchange Tower, London E14 9SR