Discretionary and Non-discretionary Commissions

In January 2024, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) launched a review of historical discretionary commissions in the motor finance sector together with a pause to complaints handling on this topic.  An unexpected Court of Appeal decision concluded that there could also be consumer harm where other types of commission were paid. The UK Supreme Court is due to consider this judgement in April 2025. 

Until the Supreme Court makes a decision, the FCA has decided to pause all motor finance commission complaints.

This means you won’t receive a final response to a commission complaint until after 4 December 2025.  You will then have up to 15 months from the date of our final response letter or until 29 July 2026 (whichever is the later) to refer your complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service.  In the meantime, we’ll acknowledge your complaint and keep you informed of any developments.

ALPHERA Financial Services is taking all necessary steps to support the FCA during the course of its review and to ensure that affected customers are supported and provided with every assistance to minimise any inconvenience.

If you entered into a regulated motor finance agreement on or after 6 April 2007 where commission was paid, you’re likely to be eligible to make a complaint.  This will include Select, Hire Purchase, Lease Purchase and Contract Hire agreements.

This applies for any type of commission, e.g. a discretionary or a non-discretionary one.

If we’ve sent you a confirmation of your commission model type, we’ll automatically log a commission complaint on your behalf and send you a letter of acknowledgement.  As a result of the FCA broadening its review, we’ll do this even if we previously advised that your agreement was out of scope (due to commission type or your product type, e.g. Contract Hire or Finance Lease).

No further action is required from you.  We’ll investigate your complaint but won’t be able to send a final response until after the FCA commission complaints pause, i.e. after 4 December 2025.

You can register a commission complaint here.

Please provide vehicle registration, finance agreement number and any previous postcode /surname at the time of your agreement.

A commission enquiry can take us a while to respond to if we can’t match your information to our records but we will come back to you and ask for additional information.

We’ll acknowledge receipt of your complaint straight away.  Post the FCA review and commission complaints pause, we expect to be able to issue a final response to you after 4 December 2025.  We’ll keep you informed of any developments in the meantime.

The complaints pause doesn’t apply to non-discretionary commission complaints received before 26 October 2024 so we’re able to respond to these within the usual 8-week period.