The boss of Britain's biggest retail bank struck a chord with the public when he complained of getting unsolicited calls from claims management firms promising him compensation from his own and other banks.
But while people share his irritation with calls and text messages about fantastic sums from claims they have not made, more and more are turning to claims management firms to help return billions tricked or bullied from them by the banks.
Facing a huge backlog of claims from the biggest mis-selling scandal in British banking history, the country's lenders are beginning to turn to claims firms for help themselves, instead of treating them as enemies.
It is a far cry from last year, when Lloyds' Chief Executive Antonio Horta-Osorio summed up the mood of many bankers by accusing the firms of fueling bogus claims, pointing to the irony of their calls to his own phone.
Horta-Osorio said one in four cases from firms claiming compensation for unwanted or unsuitable payment protection insurance — meant to protect borrowers who lost jobs or became ill — did not even have a PPI with Lloyds.
"We have to stop this," he said. "It's fraud."
The tables were turned by figures from the country's Financial Ombudsman Service showing that Lloyds lost 98 per cent of cases referred to the service in the year to March 2012, the worst record of any bank, compared with just 18 percent at Britain's biggest building society, Nationwide.
Now claims firms report a more cooperative atmosphere as the banks, which face a bill likely to far exceed the £12bn ($19bn) they have already set aside, seek to save costs and restore their battered reputations.
Craig Lowther, founder of claims company Money Boomerang, said it had been approached by several banks looking to speed up the process of dealing with claims and avoid the extra cost of referrals to the Financial Ombudsman Service.
"We're starting to see some lenders approaching us with the idea of working in a smarter way," Lowther, 41, said in an interview at Money Boomerang's offices in Manchester, England.
PPI is by far the most costly of a string of scandals to have hit Britain's banks, including interest rate rigging, breaches of anti-money laundering requirements and the mis-sale of complex interest rate hedging products to small firms.
One senior bank executive told Reuters he expected a total bill for the industry of £25bn for mis-sold PPI, while the Bank of England has said up to 10 billion pounds more may need to be set aside on top of current provisions.
The claims industry has grown around this honey pot, attracting criticism not just for the aggressive marketing, but for taking big slices of compensation from people who could keep it all if they complained directly to their banks.
Under the new arrangements, Lowther said his company fast-tracks its strongest cases to lenders and flags up unresolved cases it is about to refer to the Ombudsman in a "search-and-destroy" process that also sees it dumping illegitimate claims.
