Payment Protection Insurance (PPI)

Who was your Access card really with?

The site has had a number of enquiries about PPI claims on old policies taken out to cover Access cards. This site has no connection with Mastercard (which now owns the Access name) or with any of the banks that issued Access cards, but some background may help avoid a wild goose chase.

First, Access was simply a card brand, so you never actually did business with “Access”. You were doing business with a bank that issued credit cards bearing the Access brand. In essence, every Access card issued after 1973 was a Master Charge (later MasterCard) card, but in the early days the UK-only Access brand dominated the Master Charge brand on the card.

Even once the MasterCard logo was prominent, your credit agreement was with the issuing bank, not with MasterCard – so the thing to work out is which bank ran your Access card. Bear in mind too that Access disappeared from the market in the mid-1990s, so any claim would be very old. Banks have no legal obligation to keep financial records for more than six years, so they may hold no evidence of your payments (your own old statements help), and mis-selling is hard to prove after so long.

The author always advised contacting the bank directly rather than going through a PPI claims company. Many of those companies encouraged false claims, which slowed the whole process down, swallowed up money meant for genuine claimants, and of course took a cut of money that was rightly yours.