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Recommendations to the G20

Consumers International's recommendations to the G20

To mark World Consumer Rights Day 2011, Consumers International (CI) launched a set of recommendations to the G20 on consumer protection in financial services. CI wants the G20 and other governments to adopt these recommendations and support their implementation.

• 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.

For more information you can find the full policy report on the Resources page, or download the Executive Summary below.