Belgium's financial ombudsman receives fewer complaints

Consumers of financial services made fewer complaints to Belgium’s financial ombudsman service – known as Ombudsfin – last year, and the largest number had to do with payment transactions, according to the service’s annual report.

Last year saw 2,324 complaints filed by consumers, 8.5% fewer than the previous year. Of those, 626 were declared admissible. To be accepted by Ombudsfin, a complaint has to meet a number of conditions and must first have been presented to the financial institution concerned without producing a satisfactory result.

The largest single group of complaints – almost one in three of the total – concerned payment transactions, including purchases made following the loss or theft of a debit or credit card. A new sort of complaint appeared in 2013, relating to confusion over the difference between a national bank transfer and a European bank transfer.

Complaints about consumer credit grew slightly, by six cases to 93, while there were fewer complaints about mortgages, from 97 down to 82. In all, these accounted for 28% of  complaints.

Complaints about financial instruments no longer make up the largest group, but still represent one in four of all cases. The report says the service had to deal with a number of cases of people with a conservative financial profile – the type of investor not usually prone to taking risks – being sold unusually risky, complex-structured investments.

Meanwhile, in a separate report, the complaints made by businesses went up by 60% to 199 cases. By far the greatest number were related to professional credit, mainly so-called funding loss – the charge levied by a bank or other lender when the client repays a loan earlier than scheduled, which causes the bank to lose out on interest payments. In most of these cases, Ombudsfin was able to negotiate a reduction in the penalty paid, particularly where the decision on early repayment was made in light of economic circumstances outside the borrower’s control.

photo courtesy Dave Dugdale/Wikimedia Commons