The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has revealed that Arnold Schwarzenegger is featuring in a new campaign designed to create awareness of the deadline to make a complaint about Payment Protection Insurance (PPI).

In an advert launched today, an animatronic model of Arnie’s head is seen urging people to make a decision about making a PPI complaint before the deadline on 29th August 2019.

The FCA has introduced the deadline in order to prompt people into deciding whether to check if they had PPI and whether they want to make a complaint.

The campaign has been designed by the FCA, who introduced the deadline which will bring to an end over a decade of complaints about PPI. The campaign will appear on TV, online and on outdoor advertising across the UK over the next two years.

Andrew Bailey, chief executive of the FCA, said: “Our campaign aims to cut through the noise on PPI. We want to encourage people to decide whether to find out if they had PPI and whether to complain or not. Our message, and Arnie’s, is ‘do it now’ and I urge people to make a decision before the deadline on 29 August 2019.”

Over £27.4bn has been paid out to customers since the FCA introduced rules for complaining about PPI in 2011. PPI policies were sold alongside loans, credit cards, store cards and mortgages mostly between the 1990s and 2010.

The campaign is being paid for by the 18 firms including banks, building societies and credit card providers who had the most PPI complaints. Firms have also agreed to a number of steps to ensure that the complaints process is as easy as possible for their customers. These include:

• providing an option for people to submit their complaint online;
• ensuring that complaint forms are as easy to understand as possible and don’t put customers off complaining;
• providing support to vulnerable customers who may need extra help to submit complaints;
• providing useful and free-to-use PPI checking processes.

Today also marks the start of a new basis for complaining about PPI, meaning customers could be entitled to compensation – even if they were not mis-sold. If a customer has complained about PPI previously, and had the complaint rejected, they may be entitled to compensation if the provider earned a high level of commission from selling PPI.

The FCA has established a new dedicated phone line designed to assist customers with their PPI queries. The FCA has also updated its webpages to give more help to customers in making a decision.