25 april 2024, 09:40

Financial Ombudsman proposes measures to reduce the involvement of car lawyers in settling CMTPL disputes

In order to reduce the activity of unscrupulous car lawyers in the field of CMTPL insurance, it is essential that consumer identification should be carried out through MFCs when submitting hard copy appeals to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), Financial Ombudsman Svetlana Maximova insisted at the conference “Claims&Pays 2024. Loss settlement in insurance”.

“The number of hard copy appeals to the Financial Ombudsman has increased significantly after we introduced consumer identification via the Unified State Identification Authority when submitting appeals electronically,” Svetlana Maximova said. As a rule, some of the hard copy appeals are submitted not by consumers, but by representatives on behalf of the consumer, which is unacceptable in accordance with the Law on the Financial Ombudsman.

In this regard, the Financial Ombudsman Service proposes to fix such an order, in which identification should be carried out by MFCs, and it is also necessary to limit the option of filing a hard copy appeal only to its submission through MFCs.

“We have had cases when we received hard copy appeals, requested information on the contract from the insurance company, and the insurer reported that the client had died six months previously and their heirs had already applied for a refund of the insurance premium,” Svetlana Maximova commented.

Another measure could be the legislative enshrinement of the insurer’s right to make a payment under the CMTPL insurance contract by postal transfer to the address of the consumer, not to his/her representative, despite the presence of the representative’s bank details in the documents provided to the insurer. In this case, a number of issues would need to be worked out, such as the address to which the postal transfer should be made, given that in some cases the consumer’s registration address does not coincide with the consumer’s actual location.

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