Financial ombudsman calls for better dialogue with FCA
Better communication is needed between the Financial Ombudsman Service and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to address problems in the financial sector more quickly, MPs have been told.
The Financial Ombudsman Service’s chief executive Abby Thomas told the Treasury select committee that better data sharing between the ombudsman and the City regulator would also better protect consumers.
She said that while she believed the ombudsman’s powers are sufficient, the incoming consumer duty rules will strengthen the position of consumers where currently her organisation is unable to help.
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Thomas told MPs that where the ombudsman is unable to uphold a consumer’s complaint it passes information to the FCA if it’s relevant, but said she would like to see improvements in this area to help better protect consumers.
“What we do at present is we capture the [case] information in a single system and we flag that information out to the FCA through our working level contacts,” Thomas said to the committee, which was reported on by FT Adviser.
“I would like to look at opportunities to share our data in a more timely way so that we can have a kind of early warning signal in place if we see a particular product type, or a particular complaint type or even a particular firm that had an elevated number of complaints compared to what we would expect.”
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When Thomas became chief executive of the Financial Ombudsman Service in June 2022 it had a backlog of 158,000 complaints. This has been reduced to 29,000 cases.
So far this year the ombudsman has received 258,000 complaints against firms.
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