Parents - be warned. Do NOT risk your children with Marmalade Insurance
Any parents thinking about taking out a policy for one of their children with Marmalade Insurance, please read this and think carefully about going elsewhere.
Our child (now 22) was added twice by my wife and I as a Named Driver to my wife's car insurance, in 2020 and 2021 respectively. The product was fine, no issue (we thought)
Yesterday, at least 3 and probably 4 years later, we received a letter from a CRS (a Credit Re-assignment agency), addressed to our son at our home address, saying that they had taken over a debt of (wait for it!) £29.26 from Marmalade Insurance, and that I should have no more dealings with Marmalade (who I haven't heard from since the end of the second policy in 2021) as they were now the owners of my son's debt!
He called Marmalade and they said they were not able to give me any information about what this sum related to. When my son said truthfully that he not once over 4 years received any kind of payment request, they gave him the email address they said they held for him. This was my son's email address from his secondary school, that he left in the summer of 2021 and has not been able to access since, like all school leavers
It is actually even worse. We as his parents checked our own email records and this confirmed that it was myself in 2020 and my wife in 2021 who had paid for the policies, and therefore my son had been wrongly (and we think illegally) identified by Marmalade as responsible for this paltry sum.
i) My son never had any kind of financial contract with Marmalade
ii) between 2020 and 2024 he never received a single explanation or payment request from Marmalade of any outstanding sum. If they sent any at all (we have no evidence they did), it was sent to a dead email address that was given in 2020 at the time of his first being added as named learner driver via a Marmalade product, but he then left school as year later
iii) Marmalade then seem 4 years later to have basically "sold" the debt of £29 to this Credit Reassignment Services company (online searches show that the business model for firms like CRS is that they normally buy bulk minor debts for around 60-70% of face value).
iv) Marmalade customer service refused to give him any detail over the phone, saying that the account was now "owned" by CRS
The reason parents should NOT trust a company that acts in this way is not because of £30, which is obviously neither here nor there
But Marmalade and their lamentable administration systems and multiple failures are playing with your children's credit histories and future credit searches
I am obviously going to establish and reverse any adverse credit report on my son's name made by Marmalade, but parents should be WARNED.
Don't be fooled by the slick brand and lovely website. And certainly don't be fooled by the values statement on the Marmalade website - which talks about how they "support young people" and "We work with empathy, and in collaboration with our young community"
Empathy and collaboration?!
Marmalade just threatened to wreck our son's impeccable credit history and future prospects by flogging a debt incorrectly assigned to him for around £20 to this CRS agency.
My wife and I have been customers of Marmalade over three products (two for this son, and 1 for a daughter). Our premiums paid probably close to above £1000 over that time. And the thanks we get is Marmalade playing fast and loose with our son's credit prospects for the sake of £20
Lived experience is how you judge the real values of a company
Parents, don't make the mistake we did. Go elsewhere