As the cost of the mis-selling scandal continues to rise, the UK's biggest banks strive to limit their total bill.

Britain’s banks have embarked on a secret lobbying drive to curtail the soaring cost of the payment protection insurance (PPI) mis-selling scandal. The effort to limit the industry’s bill comes as the tab for the four biggest high street banks (Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland) last week passed £10bn following a rush of new claims submitted in the third quarter of the year. The British Bankers’ Association (BBA) is now in talks with the City regulator to urge it to declare that the point at which consumer awareness of PPI mis-selling is widely-known has now legally been reached. Under existing rules, customers have six years from the date on which they were sold a PPI policy to complain that it was mis-sold; however, they are also allowed to submit a claim three years after the point at which they say they became aware they were mis-sold to, even if that date is after the end of the six-year period.

The BBA is now arguing that because publicity about PPI mis-selling has been so widespread in the media and an advertising blitz orchestrated by claims management companies (CMCs), the Financial Services Authority (FSA) should now declare that the ‘point of knowledge’ has been passed. Until such a declaration arrives from the FSA or the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), banks argue that they may face many more years of compensation claims worth billions of pounds.....Read more here: Banks In Secret PPI Lobbying Push