Ombudsman News 183

From the complaints that we see, consumers aren’t always aware of their rights and the protection that's available when using plastic cards and credit.

 Viv Kelly, Ombudsman Director for Consumer Credit, explains more about the issues we've seen – and how our updated guidance can help financial businesses deliver good outcomes for consumers.

We’ve recently updated our information for financial businesses on bank account closures.

Our approach hasn’t changed but we’re providing more detail on what we look at, including information about the law, regulations and notice periods. We also share information about how long a business has to resolve a complaint before we can get involved.

Since the Duty was announced we’ve worked closely with the FCA and the industry in preparation. Now that the Duty is in force, we’ll continue to speak to firms to understand what complaints they are receiving and how they are responding. 

Our Business Support Hub is here to help financial businesses and consumer representatives find fair and reasonable solutions to customer disputes before they escalate.

On our website, you can find out more about how the Business Support Hub could help you, including some recently published examples of enquiries that illustrate how they responded.

Looking for a new challenge?

Use your experience of financial products, customer service or complaint-handling to give answers that help to resolve disputes.

We’re looking for Investigators who can:

• build trust
• communicate with empathy
• get to the heart of consumers’ complaints

This is a remote role. You’ll need to travel to our new regional hub in central Edinburgh once every eight weeks.

Last month, we shared information about the types of complaint we’ve seen in credit hire and credit repair services. We also urged industry to take an approach which is balanced, fair and transparent.