FICS to fix appeals process
Alison Maynard
Financial planners could soon have a greater right of appeal over the decisions of the Financial Industry Complaints Service (FICS) on consumer complaints.
Chief executive Alison Maynard said FICS is considering making changes to the national panel’s decision-making process to facilitate a greater right to appeal for both members and consumers.
“There are some limited grounds for a re-opening of a panel decision currently, but it may be that in the future we will have to look at this process,” she said.
A greater right of appeal emerged as a key topic at FICS’s inaugural Decision-Maker Forum last month, which was held to enhance the transparency of its national panel’s decision-making process.
About 80 FICS members — as well as some professional indemnity insurers — attended the forum.
“The feedback of members will be taken into account when we consider making changes to the decision-making process in the future,” Maynard said.
“In particular, members’ concerns about a lack of an appeals process might result in us looking at whether or not we have a couple of stages of decision-making within FICS.”
Under current rules, she said, a panel decision “can be re-opened at the request of a party on the grounds of failing to provide procedural fairness, obvious errors on the record and those sorts of issues”.
“However, I think that our members would be looking for an appeals process that goes beyond that which we have at the moment.”
FICS’s merger with the Banking and Financial Services Ombudsman and the Insurance Ombudsman Service on July 1, this year, would “provide an opportunity for a complete review of all its processes”, according to Maynard.
The new organisation, to be named the Financial Ombudsman Service, will initially “continue to handle consumer complaints exactly as FICS does now in terms of its rules”, she said.
“However, over time there will be a new process developed to handle all the consumer complaints coming into the merged organisation.”
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