Coronavirus (COVID-19)

*Only applicable to customers who have received communication from us and have been automatically redirected.

You recently received a communication from us about your current payment deferral coming to an end.  If you do not require any further support from us, your payments will resume automatically on the date we communicated to you. 

If your income is still impacted temporarily by COVID-19 and you think that you will have difficulty resuming your new payment amount, we will consider what further assistance we can offer.

To help us asses this, we need more information about your current financial situation.  Please use our financial assessment tool here where you have the option to either;

a)     enable Open Banking* where you share your banking transaction data with us, allowing us make an assessment of your income and expenditure; or

b)     complete a full income and expenditure form.

We will use the information you provide to assess your situation and to agree the best approach to help you. As well as looking at your outgoings and current income, we will consider your personal circumstances, overall indebtedness and current repayment capacity.

If we agree to extend your payment deferral:

• the term of your agreement will remain the same;
•  when your payments resume, they will be increased proportionally to cover any payments deferred;
•  when your payments resume, they must be made during the period you agreed for the first payment deferral; and
• interest will be charged on the deferred amount.

Example

We agreed with you in April to defer three months’ payments and that when your payments resume, you would pay these by proportionally increasing your payments for the rest of the term of the agreement.  If we now agree an extension to your payment deferral, once your payments resume, any additional deferred payments must also be paid proportionally over the rest of the term of the finance agreement.

Debt help and money guidance

You should only ask us for help if you really need it.  If you want to assess whether a payment deferral is right for you, we strongly recommend that you visit the Money Advice Service’s Money Navigator Tool.  If your income has been affected by the pandemic or you are having difficulty managing your money, we encourage you to visit this information page from the Financial Conduct Authority to enable you to access the help that best suits your circumstances. 

We recommend that you work out a budget with the help of the information provided by the Financial Conduct Authority.  For most people, it makes sense to pay essential expenses and priority debts before any discretionary expenses or non-priority debts.  To see if this is right for you, we suggest that you use online guides such as the Money Advice Service ‘How to prioritise your debts’ page.  We also recommend that you should contact all of your creditors to discuss your repayments.

We are dealing with unprecedented demand and extension request are being processed as quickly as possible. However, if there is a delay in processing an application and if you are successful in your application, we will backdate the payment deferral for you and your credit rating will not be affected by this. 

*Open Banking is a secure service provided by us in association with Equifax and AccountScore, where you give us access to the recent transactions in your bank account.  This data is analysed to help us calculate what you can afford to repay.