Another day, another probe

摘要

For an industry that likes to think of itself as staid and grey-suited, Britain's banks have been getting far more attention than they would like. Last week the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), a competition watchdog, said that it planned to scrutinise the market for payment-protection insurance on loans, valued at £5.4 billion in 2003. Profit margins on loan-insurance policies appeared high, the regulator said. Just a month earlier, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), the industry's main regulator, said that investigators who went undercover to check into the matter found firms at risk of mis-selling these policies.