LONDON (Bloomberg) — General Electric Company’s GE Capital Bank unit was fined $610,000 ($1.2 million) by the UK’s market regulator for failing to give customers enough information about a type of insurance policy it sells.Employees at the bank, which provides store cards and credit cards, gave customers inadequate advice about payment protection insurance policies, the Financial Services Authority said yesterday.

Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) is sold to debtors to cover repayments in case of illness or unemployment. The FSA, which has made regulating sales practices in the industry a top priority, said many of GE’s representatives didn’t warn clients to read the terms of the PPI policies before buying one.

“Millions of people take out store cards every year,” said Margaret Cole, the FSA’s director of enforcement. “They need to know that PPI is almost always optional and should consider whether they need it before signing up.”

The market for the payment protection policies was worth $5.5 billion in 2005, the UK Office of Fair Trading said in a report last October. As many as seven million policies are sold in the UK annually, the department said. In 2005, GE sold more than 850,000.

“We fully accept the FSA’s decision,” said Stewart Macphail, the chief executive for cards at GE Capital Bank. He said the unit had co-operated with the FSA.

Because it agreed to settle the case at an early stage, the bank qualified for a 30 percent discount on the fine, the FSA said. The fine would have been $870,000, it said.

The regulator said Capital Bank’s own research, conducted from February to December 2005, found that as many as three quarters of sales assistants didn’t advise customers to read the written policy statement.