A rigid complaints framework, including an eight-week response time, often prevents claims from being as “immediate and responsive” as they need to be and may be reviewed in the future, the chief executive of the Financial Ombudsman Service has said.
Caroline Wayman, chief executive and chief ombudsman, told FTAdviser that reviewing the current framework was a key consideration for the service, and that the Financial Conduct Authority is “open” to thinking about this further.
She said: “There’s people who are saying ‘I can’t feed my kids - they took the last £60 quid from my account and what am I going to do?’
“When we contact them they give the money back pretty sharpish, but it’s an example of where we’ve needed to adapt our way of working actually instead of saying, ‘oh well we’ll fill in a form and we’ll give them eight weeks.’
Ms Wayman explained: “We phone them up and say ‘your customer has been in contact with us and apparently you have taken these amounts’ and pretty much always they refund them then, but it’s an example of where sometimes the complaints framework is not as immediate and responsive as it needs to be.”
She added: “They [the FCA] have been thinking already about some of the rules around complaint handling. The eight-week rule makes sense in the context of some sorts of disputes.
“If you’ve got to investigate a flood claim, you’ve got to go and get the loss adjusters report, gather information and weigh all that up, then you can see why eight weeks is needed. Similarly in if you have a difficult pensions dispute then you need to look closely at that then sure, eight weeks is fine.”
However, Ms Wayman continued that for more urgent cases of people in immediate financial difficulties, the system needs to be able respond quicker.
“I think its something that’s not going to happen overnight but that needs to be looked at in due course so that people think about what a complaints framework looks like.”
ruth.gillbe@ft.com
