Startline Motor Finance

Startline is a Glasgow-based motor finance company. It says it works with many dealers and introducers in the UK.

Startline is supposed to carry out sufficient checks, to ensure that the finance is sustainably affordable for the customer. But the checks it carries out are not always good enough. In upholding
a complaint, an ombudsman said:

‘I don’t think it was proportionate of Startline to have relied on what Mrs M said about her expenses, given that the repayments would have a significant impact on her monthly wages. And I don’t  think that the information Mrs M declared at the time negates the requirement for Startline to have assessed the risk to her of not managing to meet her repayments.’ https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/decision/DRN-3200278.pdf

Not all customers will have enough money to pay back Startline on a monthly basis. And this could be because Startline made an irresponsible lending decision. For example, it could be that the
customer did not have the disposable income for the repayments on the finance agreement, together with the associated costs of running a car and living in general:

‘Mr S’ bank statements show he had an income of around £1,100. Mr S transferred around £600 to the joint account each month for payments of bills and had further committed expenditure for items such as petrol, food and  other credit commitments of around £400. This demonstrates that taking Mr S’ income and expenses into account Mr S didn’t have enough disposable income to afford the additional borrowing’ https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/decision/DRN-3226188.pdf