23 may 2024, 10:53

FOS representatives meet with Kazakhstan’s Insurance Ombudsman

On 21 May, a meeting of representatives of the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) chaired by Chief Financial Ombudsman Yury Voronin and Insurance Ombudsman of Kazakhstan Igor Yakovenko took place.

The event was also attended on behalf of the Service by Olga Kraynova, head of the Ombudsman for financial services consumers support Service (OFSC), and FOs Svetlana Maximova, Tatiana Savitskaya and Victor Klimov. Representatives of the Bank of Russia and the All-Russian Union of Insurers also participated in the meeting.

The meeting was held under the auspices of the current Advisory Committee of the Financial Ombudsman Schemes of the Eurasian Economic Union Member States, which was established in 2022 on the FOS initiative and comprised representatives of Russia, Armenia and Kazakhstan.

The Kazakhstani colleague’s visit was mainly aimed at getting acquainted with the FOS practice in Russia. Yury Voronin in his presentation outlined the principles and organisation of work, the structure of the Service, presented statistics on the work with citizens’ appeals, prospects for Service’s further improvement.

Olga Kraynova made detailed account of the OFSC operation, particularly of the organisation’s tasks, of services and remote resources used to assist a consumer in completing and submitting an appeal. In particular, the FOS website provides the Consumer’s Personal Account service, the Consumer Knowledge Base, the Dispute Qualification Service, and Blitz-Checking of documents. In the Contact Centre one can find out about the status of the appeal and ask other questions related to the activities of the Service, as well as an online reception of consumers, the “Friendly” project and a chatbot.

The head of the OFSC informed that the projects on judicial protection of Financial Ombudsman’s decisions, the Service’s interaction with financial institutions when considering appeals, as well as with various agencies and authorities, the system of financing the Institute’s activity and other issues are also successfully implemented. There are such services available for financial institutions as the financial institution’s Personal Account, Mutual Settlements service, Information Mailings and, for NPFs, the display in the personal account of the expanded composition of information for disputes on illegal transfers of pension savings.

The Social Fund’s Personal Account, the Judge’s Personal Account, the Bank of Russia’s Solutions Library, and the Expert Organisation’s Personal Account have also been launched and are successfully operating.

The Kazakhstani colleague was also told during the meeting about the arrangement of expert examinations ordered by the FOS. Olga Kraynova informed that 51,730 expert examinations were ordered in 2023, including independent technical assessment, transport-tracing diagnostics, cost of repair under hull insurance, quality of repair of vehicles, cost of repair of movable and immovable property, handwriting (signature) examination, examination of medical documents and others.

A report on the practice of co-operation between the All-Russian Union of Insurers and the Financial Ombudsman Service in dealing with appeals arising from CMTPL insurance contracts was also presented at the meeting.