Later that year, he asked the bank to consolidate his lending into a single loan and the bank replied that it would need full documentation before undertaking a reassessment of his lending to fulfil his request. Robbie considered this unreasonable because he did not believe his request would change the risk to the bank.

Our investigation

We explained to Robbie that we did not have the power to look into decisions relating to a bank’s commercial judgements, and this included lending decisions. How much risk a bank was prepared to take on was a matter for the bank alone to decide, not us. We told Robbie this meant we could not look into the decision itself or the reasons for the decision. Nor could we look into the bank's decision about what documents it needed from Robbie when he asked it to consolidate his lending.

We could, however, look at whether the bank had followed the correct process in assessing his lending application in April 2021. We did this and found it had done so.

Outcome

We could not uphold his complaint.