The Government will create a new authority for claims in the financial sector that relieves the courts

The Government will create a new authority for claims in the financial sector that relieves the courts



The council of ministers has approved this Tuesday the creation of the Independent Authority for the Defense of the Financial Client, which will centralize the claims departments of the three supervisors of the sector: the Bank of Spain, the CNMV and the General Directorate of Insurance. The new body intends to become the body that rules on conflicts that arise between financial entities and their clients, being one of the sectors that receives the most complaints. In this way, the Government intends to reduce the litigation that has marked the financial sector in recent years and has caused the collapse of the courts.

Until now, each supervisor had a claims department. With the new rule, these departments are merged into one. The vice president Nadia Calviño has defended in the press conference after the Council of Ministers that financial products are increasingly complex and affect not only one of the supervisors but several. As an example, she has pointed out that one of the main aspects that the new supervisor will incorporate will be that of crypto assets.

The main novelty regarding the current situation of these claims services is that their decisions are not binding. In other words, if the customer was right in a claim, the bank was not obliged to comply with that opinion. Now, the decisions of the new independent authority will have to be complied with by the entities for all those claims for less than 20,000 euros. The aspiration is that a response must be given to the claims within a maximum period of 90 days and lawyers or solicitors will not be necessary to be able to undertake these complaints.

The body will be directed by a committee that will be made up of the three supervisors and the General Directorate of the Treasury. The president and vice president will be appointed by the Council of Ministers for a period of six years. It will be the financial entities that finance its operation, with the approval of a fee of 250 euros for each claim. In this way, Calviño points out, an attempt is made to encourage conflicts generated in the sector to be resolved before reaching this authority, in the entities' customer service. In addition, a mechanism will be created to discourage the bank in question from taking it to court if the reason is not obtained. Lastly, the authority will have an advisory committee, which will be an advisory body and will be made up of the president and vice president of the Authority, in addition to nine members representing the Council of Consumers and Users, employers in the financial field and representatives of the autonomous communities and cities.

The draft Law affects all financial institutions: both credit institutions, investment services companies, insurance companies, financial credit establishments, participatory financing platforms, lenders and credit intermediaries, payment and electronic money institutions or issuers and service providers of the so-called fintech sector and cryptoactive services. For customers it will be a free service.

The Government thus unblocks one of the pending tasks that it had in the financial sector for years. The creation of this new authority had been on the agenda of the Ministry led by Nadia Calviño for a long time. The initiative was proposed by the previous Government of the Popular Party and the President of the Executive, Pedro Sánchez, picked it up in 2018 with the intention that the project go ahead in 2019. However, these plans were delayed by the call for general elections that year and, later, by the outbreak of the pandemic, which led the Ministry of Economic Affairs to focus on response measures to the crisis. Consumer organizations had been demanding for some time that the creation of this authority be accelerated to avoid possible abuses from the financial sector and avoid additional costs to customers when making claims. What was approved this Tuesday is a preliminary bill that is open to a public consultation that will last five weeks. After that, the bill will be drawn up, which must be approved again by the council of ministers for subsequent final processing in the Cortes. Calviño has estimated that this will occur in the second half of the year.

The vice-president has pointed out that with the presentation of this new body, the claims system that customers can take advantage of is completed. First, you can go to the entity's customer service. If that path does not satisfy the demands of the consumer, the path of the new authority is now open, whose opinions will be binding and will have to be complied with by the banks. Finally, there is the alternative of the judicial route.

The banking employers have been shown this Tuesday contrary to this model of claims. The outgoing president of the Spanish Banking Association (AEB), José María Roldán, —that this Tuesday has yielded the witness to Alejandra Kindelán— has rejected this model compared to the differentiation between the Bank of Spain and the CNMV. “The current model fits better with European practices and the new one would be more Anglo-Saxon”, he pointed out. Roldán has defended that creating new organisms is going to generate “procedural frictions”. The manager has defended, regarding the rate of 250 euros that banks must pay, that the rates are “the transfer of the cost of a public service to those who benefit from that cost, which would lead one to think that it should not be the banks [los que la asuman] because they are the ones questioned in that process.”



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