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12 may 2023, 09:15
The Financial Ombudsman Service has proposed that banks should be obliged to keep and store audio recordings of communication with their customers to enhance protection of the rights of consumers of financial services. The proposal was voiced by Chief Financial Ombudsman Yury Voronin at the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) session “International experience of out-of-court protection of financial services consumers” within the 11th St. Petersburg International Legal Forum.
“The FOS proposes to legislate the obligation for credit institutions to keep and store audio recordings of communication with consumers of their services (in particular, when entering into consumer loan agreements). This would significantly simplify the process of establishing the circumstances of the provision of a financial service to the consumer when resolving disputes,” he said.
The Chief Financial Ombudsman also spoke about unfair practices used by some credit institutions in the consumer lending. These include charging a disproportionate fee by the bank for an activation of collective insurance programme, the credit institution’s refusal to accept independently concluded the borrower’s collateral insurance contract, provided in order to maintain a reduced interest rate on the loan, failure to acknowledge personal insurance contract as collateral, when the beneficiary is not only the credit institution, but also the borrower.
Yury Voronin informed that the Financial Ombudsman Service had received in 2022 more than 150,000 appeals from consumers of financial services, about 9 per cent of which were filed against credit institutions. Most of the appeals against the credit institutions concerned issues of consumer credit. “It should be noted that a significant portion of the appeals considered on the merits relate to the provision of credit insurance services,” the Chief Financial Ombudsman added.
