IDR trumps EDR for licensees
Data provided by two of Australia’s largest financial advice providers – AMP and IOOF – has revealed the degree to which Internal Dispute Resolution (IDR) represents the best option for licensees.
The data, provided to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics found that in the case of IOOF, it achieved a far more balanced outcome in terms of dealing with customer complaints with IDR resulting in the business resolving 94 of 172 complaints being resolved in its favour with 75 being resolved in favour of the client.
This compares to a much poorer outcome for the company in external dispute resolution (EDR) matters handled by the Australian Financial Complaints Authority with just a third being resolved in favour of the business, and 15 in favour of the client albeit that four were withdrawn.
In the case of IOOF, the majority of complaints which went to EDR (36%) were around quality of advice, with 32% relating to service delivery.
For AMP, it appeared the Royal Commission had a major impact on the number of financial advice remediation complaints handled by its IDR team with almost a tripling from 42 in 2018 to 120 in in 2019 and 81 to date in 2020.
However, in terms of EDR, AMP said that its EDR team had handled nine complaints in 2018, 15 in 2019 and five so far this year.
It said themes of the complaints included appropriateness of the advice, fees for service and the remediation.
The AMP data related to cases where AMP had made an offer to clients and the clients were not happy with that offer.
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