16 october 2023, 10:05

Fifth Anniversary of the Ombudsman for financial services consumers support Service

16 October 2023 marked the fifth anniversary since the Russian Ministry of Justice registered the Autonomous Non-Profit Organisation “Ombudsman for financial services consumers support Service” (OFSC), whose founder is the Bank of Russia. During these years, Olga Kraynova has remained the invariable head of the Service.

The OFSC was established in accordance with the Federal Law of June 4, 2018 No. 123-FZ “On the Ombudsman for the Rights of Consumers of Financial Services” in order to assist the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) in preparing consumer appeals for the consideration and managing the fund for financing the FOS activities.

“For the past five years of work, the Autonomous Non-Profit Organisation “Ombudsman for financial services consumers support Service” has become one of the main elements of the national consumer protection system, as well as a key institution standing guard to protect the rights of consumers of financial services. Over these years, Financial Ombudsmen have considered more than seven hundred thousand appeals from citizens, established a system of comprehensible and transparent interaction with consumers submitting appeals, built a powerful IT-platform that allows interacting with citizens, financial institutions, courts, other government agencies and institutes of civil society,” Olga Kraynova noted.

Over the five years, the Service has received 727,796 appeals from consumers of financial services in respect of 750 financial institutions, on which the Financial Ombudsmen have taken 443,621 decisions. In order to obtain full information necessary for making Financial Ombudsman’s decisions, 245,195 independent expert examinations were arranged.

“One of the most important areas of the Service’s work is to ensure that the appeal service is accessible to consumers on their own, so that everything is as quick and easy as possible for citizens at this stage. We have been concerned with this task since the first days of the Service’s work, the OFSC keeps up with the times, using all possible modern channels of communication with citizens. Every year we launch new and fine-tune existing services for consumers, which are popular and help to ensure easy interaction, Olga Kraynova went on.

Thus, the online service on the FOS website is successfully functioning, which allows users to check independently in real time whether their dispute falls within the Financial Ombudsman’s competence. The service has launched “Online Reception”, in the course of which it conducts personal reception of citizens on a permanent basis in the video link mode. The identification and authentication tool for users of the financial services consumer’s personal account via the Unified System of Identification and Authentication (USIA) has been put into operation. Consumers actively use the “Database of Knowledge” posted on the FOS website. Communication with citizens is conducted via chatbots and the ‘Friendly’ project. Projects of face-to-face consultations on the basis of legal clinics of leading Russian universities have been implemented, too.

“Our institute is unique for the country. Let me remind you that filing an appeal to the Financial Ombudsman does not require any monetary costs to be paid by the consumer of financial services. Furthermore, in the process of filing an appeal, the consumer basically does not bear any associated costs, for example, when a Financial Ombudsman appoints an independent expert examination, all costs are paid by the OFSC,” Olga Kraynova said.

“A consumer, who is a weak party to the contract and does not have special knowledge, is not obliged to formulate his/her claims to the financial institution in legalese and come to us in person: everything can be done remotely through a personal account on our website. The consumer does not need to pay for the services of third-party lawyers to file an appeal to the Financial Ombudsman. At the same time, our decision is obligatory for the financial institution to comply with, and if it does not occur, we pass a document to the Federal Bailiff Service, a certificate, which is an analogue of a writ of execution. For these five years more than 17 thousand such certificates have been issued,” Olga Kraynova added.

“The Service carries out activities related to the development and improvement of approaches to the consideration of appeals of financial services consumers, as well as the legislation development in the field of consumer protection on a permanent basis,” Olga Kraynova continued. “In order to improve the efficiency of this work, a new structural unit, the Methodological Centre, was established. In the “single window” mode the Methodological Centre employees are engaged both in shaping the uniform law enforcement practice of the Service, and in supporting the interaction of the Service with state bodies, representatives of the financial market, as well as in supporting the Service’s participation in the processes of enhancing the current legislation,” the Head of the OFSC clarified.

“On this holiday, I’d like to say thank you to the Service’s staff for fruitful and quality work, as well as to all those who supported us all these years and contributed to the strengthening and advancement of the OFSC,” Olga Kraynova added.

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