Who is Hector Sants? Have you heard of him? Mr Sants is the head of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and he’s come out and said that the financial regulator will toughen up protection for consumers and stop risky products being sold. This goes against what seems to have been the FSA’s approach previously, which was let mis sold PPI and endowment policies happen, then pay out compensation when the horse has bolted.

Mixed metaphors aside, Mr Sants said: “We will now seek to proactively intervene earlier in the product chain to anticipate consumer detriment and choke it off before it occurs.” Well, the FSA have some making up to do, over the previous 20 banks and lenders have mis sold mortgage endowments, personal pensions and payment protection insurance left, right and centre, and up, down, diagonally and another angle you can think of.

Payment Protection Insurance News: Insurance provider Axa has ended its contract with Berkeley Alexander to underwrite two of its mortgage payment protection insurance (MPPI) offerings. As of March 31st, the underwriting contract will end and as a result, commission payments on some MPPI products sold via the broker have been cut to 15%.

There has been a few changes at AXA over the last year, in March 2009 the broker withdrew its Payment Protection Insurance products for new customers, also known as accident, sickness and unemployment cover. Speaking about the withdrawal from the MPPI contract, an Axa spokeswoman said: “This particular scheme is quite small and, in consultation with the broker concerned, we will no longer underwrite this product after March 31.”

HSBC Private Bank in Switzerland recently spent over £60million on improved security for its systems, want to have a guess why? Yep, they got compromised by an IT technician who stole unencrypted customer account data and posted it to third parties. So first things first, if you’ve got an account with HSBC in Switzerland, you might want to ring your relationship manager and check all the pennies are in their place.

The news of the theft emerged this week as the FSA released the findings of it’s investigation, which stated the crime occured in 2006 and HSBC only found out about it in December 2008. The personal details of an estimated 24,000 clients of HSBC Private Bank in Switzerland were stolen and HSBC says that the stolen data is “highly likely” to contain info on British account holders.

????????????????What some believe was the root of the recession, sub-prime lending, is back and this time it’s in the form of a credit card fromided by Provident Financial. The Vanquis card is aimed at those with a bad credit history or consumers struggling to get credit elsewhere.

Over 1 million consumers have already signed up for the plastic wallet warmer that comes with an interest rate set at a whopping 60%. And that million is set to grow with around 2,700 new applications flooding in every day, including ones from the previously credit abundant middle class families. It’s no surprise that so many people are choosing the Vanquis seeing as UK consumer credit card debt has reached £61.5billion.

If you’re not in love with the banks at the moment (that’s all of us then) you now have a new option when it comes to finding credit and earning interest. We’re not talking loan sharks or risky stocks, we’re talking about a person to person lending site called Zopa.

With banks being enemy number one, due to mis sold PPI and sky high interest rates, business at Zopa’s community lending site has gone through the roof. The idea is: users can arrange a person-to-person loan, anywhere from £10 to £25,000, on their own terms and it’s proving popular with lending doubling over the last 12 months to £36.4m

Quality not Quantity – the new approach from UK banks towards unsecured lending, oh and hiking the interst rate as well, that’s the other approach. Figures released by industry analyst Defaqto revealed that a £5,000 loan wil cost you 42% more today than it would’ve 2 years ago with the average APR on a up from 9.8% to 13.9% in the same time period.

As well as loan rates, credit card interest is at it’s highest point for 12 years and all because the banks need to cover all the wreckless, care free lending they issued throughout the boom. But that’s not the only reason for rocketing the rates, mr banker also wants to pocket some extra money to make up for the all the Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) policies that they can’t mis-sell or forceably include alongside borrowings.