News

World Consumer Rights Day 2011: Consumer groups demand fair financial services of G20 leaders

15 Mar 2011

Consumers International has sent a set of international recommendations for strengthening consumer financial protection. Copies of the report were sent on 15 March 2011, World Consumer Rights Day.

Consumers International (CI) has sent a set of international recommendations for strengthening consumer financial protection. Copies of the report were sent to G20 leaders, the Financial Stability Board, the OECD, the World Bank and EU Commissioners.

The recommendations are in response to the G20 commitment to address consumer protection in financial services at the Seoul Summit in November 2010. The G20's commitment followed a campaign led by CI and involving consumer organisations from G20 and non-G20 countries.

Global consumer movement

Drawing on evidence from CI's worldwide membership, who consistently report poor financial services as one of the top consumer complaints, the recommendations highlight what can be done to support fairness, safety, access and competition in financial services.

Ahead of the launch of the recommendations, Consumers International Director General, Joost Martens said:

"There are as many bank accounts in the world as there are adults, and 150 million new consumers join the market for financial services every year. Yet consumers around the world - in both rich and poor countries - are continuing to get a raw deal from banks and other financial service providers.

"These ground-breaking recommendations are the product of a shared sense of anger within the consumer movement that the rights of financial consumers have been neglected for too long. They provide a clear and comprehensive set of demands for significantly improving financial protection for consumers everywhere."

The recommendations

The report, Safe, fair and competitive markets for financial services: recommendations for the G20 on the enhancement of consumer protection in financial services, calls for:

A new international organisation to support work on financial consumer protection: a permanent international organisation to enable national financial consumer protection bodies to share good practice, issue public alerts, and develop minimum standards and guidelines.

Mandatory financial consumer protection bodies: national regulators with full authority to investigate, halt and remedy violations of consumer protection law, including, where necessary, the right to define specific practices or products as unfair, deceptive or otherwise illegal.

Clearer contracts, charges and practices: regulators should introduce a requirement of comprehensibility, and remove from the market products that do not meet minimum standards. Financial advice to consumers should be separated from sales-based remuneration.

Effective redress and dispute resolution: consumers should have access to adequate individual and collective redress systems. To alleviate the immense strains experienced by existing systems, lessons from disputes should also be synthesised into consumer protection further upstream.

Measures to promote stability and safety of consumers' deposits and investments: including separation of investment and retail banking divisions, bank 'living wills' with guarantees for protecting consumer deposits and reform of insolvency procedures so that the rank of creditors is changed to put depositors at the top.

Competition in financial services: reverse the market concentration, which, accelerated by the financial crisis, has contributed to the creation of institutions that are 'too big to fail'. Remove barriers that discourage consumers from switching accounts.

Better information design and disclosure: financial service providers should be required to take more responsibility for ensuring consumers receive clear, sufficient, reliable, comparable and timely information about financial service products.

Universal access to basic financial services: governments should seek to encourage innovation in safe, effective, low-cost methods for banking inclusion whilst supporting the development of consumer protection.

World Consumer Rights Day

The report's launch on 15 March is timed to mark World Consumer Rights Day, when consumer groups across the world will be lobbying their governments to act on fair financial services.