Not upheld: account upgrade not completed; travel insurance not activated; alleged failure to transmit customer data to insurance provider complaint against Lloyds Bank PLC

Decision detail

Summary

Miss M held a Lloyds bank account and sought to upgrade to a Silver Plus account with travel insurance benefits during a video appointment on 24 February 2025. The upgrade application timed out during the meeting, but Miss M received an email at 6:08pm with a Silver Club welcome pack attached, which she mistakenly believed confirmed the upgrade was complete. When Miss M's trip was cancelled and she attempted to claim on travel insurance on 13 March, she discovered the account had never been upgraded and she was not covered. The ombudsman found that the email was a statement of demands and needs sent during the application process (not confirmation of upgrade), the application was never completed on 24 February, and Miss M should have recognized this from the email content and the unchanged account name in her banking app. The complaint was not upheld as Lloyds made no error.

The Ombudsman's reasoning

The ombudsman found that the application was not completed on 24 February due to timeout, evidenced by the timing of the demands and needs email at 6:08pm (during application process) and the absence of a confirmation email until 13 March when the application was successfully completed. The email Miss M received was clearly marked as a statement of demands and needs sent during the application process, not confirmation of upgrade, with explicit language stating terms and conditions would follow upon completion. The ombudsman concluded Miss M made an unfortunate presumption based on the attached welcome pack without properly reading the email content, and that multiple indicators (no account name change, insurance company having no record, no confirmation email) should have alerted her that the upgrade was incomplete. The ombudsman found no error on Lloyds' part.

How this compares

Source

Read the original decision on the Financial Ombudsman Service website