Consumer Associations: A Major Player in Responsible Digital Finance

Last week, Marta Tellado, President and CEO of Consumer Reports and Board Member of Consumers International, released her book, Buyer Aware: Harnessing Our Consumer Power for a Safe, Fair, and Transparent Marketplace. She reflects on how the changing marketplace is failing to protect consumers to live the life they want and how consumer advocates can help consumers everywhere fight back.

When my family fled Cuba in the early 1960s, my parents’ dream to live in a free and open society became the opening chapter of my story. All my life I’ve been committed to ensuring that their heartbreak of leaving home wouldn’t be in vain and have worked to make the country they brought me to a place where freedoms and economic equity would coexist and thrive.

The irony is that the nation I live in is now made up of many corporations that value profit over people, safety, and wellbeing. That pattern has spread over much of the world. And we have found ourselves living in an environment where the rules and standards created to empower consumers, within individual countries and throughout our international community, are profoundly insufficient to keep pace with the transformation of our marketplace.

 

Today, we increasingly see big tech companies treat consumers like commodities, the spread of misinformation which undermines trust, financial firms cheat customers with impunity, too many communities discriminated against in the economy, and unsafe products and services entering the market which cost hundreds of lives and trillions of dollars each year.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I wrote my book, Buyer Aware: Harnessing Our Consumer Power for a Safe, Fair, and Transparent Marketplace, to tell a larger story about our marketplace – that it can only flourish if it is both fair and just for everyone. The book reveals what’s holding us back and how we can be a force for change.

The key to this movement is people from around the globe. Consumers are a sleeping giant of power, and we don’t have to accept the way things are, particularly when consumer advocates can help people everywhere fight back and shape an economy that values consumer rights.

At Consumer Reports, our goal is to create a consumer-first marketplace where each person can be the driver of their own destiny. With so much at stake, this is the moment to reclaim our most fundamental principles. And for decades, Consumer International has been our vital partner.

Together we have seen great impact from our work. In this year alone, we came together for an investigation into personalised pricing which found discriminatory practices on the basis of age and led to business change. And our joint efforts around consumer harms relating to Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) led to the Government of Australia committing to regulation.

The challenges consumers face are dynamic and know no boundaries, and they require creating a consumer-first marketplace that is critical for every person around the world. Because no matter what country or continent, consumers want – and deserve – the same things:  

  • A life where our children and families are safe–in the real world and online.
  • A life where we can trust products and services without being victimised by scams, tricks and traps.
  • A life where we have the opportunity to get a loan without having our savings drained by unscrupulous lenders.
  • A life where we and the people we care about are treated fairly, whether we’re buying a home or applying for a new job.
  • A life where we know the food and items we buy won’t hurt our own health or our environment.
  • A life with the freedom to make choices that are right for us, so we can determine our own future.

 

When the market puts people at the center – when it offers us safety, trust, opportunity, fairness, and freedom – it makes the life we want possible.

But how do we get there? We need to restore accountability and transparency, because these principles are essential to the trust people must have for our world to flourish. That means taking back control of consumers’ personal data that’s being sold to the highest bidder, holding social media companies accountable for the misinformation spread on their platforms, stopping the financial tricks and traps that so often leave consumers in a whirlpool of debt and ending the discrimination in our digital world, from algorithms that are biased to problematic facial recognition tech.

When the rules are fair, the incentives are positive, and leaders in business and government are accountable for their actions — we can create an international marketplace that works for everyone. But nothing will change without a global movement. That is where Consumer Reports, Consumers International, and its Members come in – being well placed with over 60 years of success shifting global imbalances – to empower consumers.

Coming together, alongside the many businesses and policy-makers who are committed to good practice, we can change the rules to put people at the center of our marketplace. We can rally for the rights and freedoms that make a better life possible for all of us. The marketplace is about supply and demand – and it’s time we demand more.