The creation of the long-awaited Financial Customer Defense Authority seems to finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. The economic vice president, Nadia Calviño, announced this Monday that the Government plans to analyze a draft bill for its constitution in one of the next Councils of Ministers to submit the text to public audience (receive comments from interested parties) in March. “It will be a very useful mechanism to ensure that financial entities comply with their obligations of conduct towards its clients and also to promote the financial education“, he assured during the signing of the banking plan to improve the care of the elderly, advanced this Sunday by El Periódico, a newspaper belonging to the same editorial group as this medium.
Once the contributions of the interested parties have been received, the draft will return to the Minister council for its approval with the modifications that the Government considers pertinent, to later arrive at the Parliament for processing. The Executive believes it is possible to have the definitive green light from Congress by the end of the year. Other financial sources see this deadline as rushed and warn that the project might decay if the call for general electionssomething that they estimate will happen in any case before the Spanish Presidency of the EU of the second semester of 2023. In any case, the complexity and the budgetary cost of setting up a new institution make it probable that it would not enter in operation until next year.
Calviño has also announced that the Executive is going to approve “in the coming weeks” the customer service bill, which “is already practically pending” the report of the Council of State. It is a rule led by the Ministry of Consumer Affairs of which Economy is a co-proponent. Said project, the vice-president affirmed, will include “specific requirements for the financial sector so that the channels and personalized attention are improved to guarantee that adequate response to customers”.
Revolution in claims
The birth of the Authority will suppose a revolution in the dispute resolution procedure between the entities (which will finance it) and their clients (for whom it will be free). Thus, its resolutions will be binding for the banks, investment firms and insurance companies up to a certain amount claimed (50,000 euros was considered in 2019), while users will be able to continue going to the courts if they do not agree with the opinion. Today, the rulings of the claims services of the Bank of Spain, the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) and the General Directorate of Insurance and Pension Funds are not mandatory for the entities, so it is not uncommon for them to ignore them when they agree with the client, leading them to a long and costly legal process.
Despite this, the process of creating the new public institution is tortuous, as the Ombudsman has been pointing out for years. It derives from a 2013 European regulation on out-of-court resolution of consumer disputes that member countries had to have incorporated into national legislation on July 9, 2015 as late. Rajoy’s government did it late, in a law of November 2017 in which, in addition, it was given until 3 july 2018 to send a bill to the Cortes. His last Minister of Economy, Roman Escolanocame to take out a prior public consultation, but the motion of censure that brought Pedro Sánchez to the presidency shortly before that term expired aborted his plans.
Supervisor opposition
His successor, Nadia Calviño, resumed work in 2018 already early 2019 came to have prepared draft bill. However, first the two general elections of that year that they had the Government in office, and then the burst of the pandemic in 2020, which made other matters more pressing, were delaying the project. at the end of january last yearhowever, Economy began to exchange documents with the supervisory organisms, although the works have been extended more than a year due to the greater urgency of actions once morest the economic effects of covid and the deployment of European funds.
The Bank of Spain and the CNMV, in any case, they have publicly expressed in recent years their reluctance to create the Authority (the General Directorate of Insurance does not, but it is integrated into the Ministry). His bet is to go to the model known as ‘twin peaks’, in which the first of them adds to the solvency supervision banks, investment companies and insurance companies, and the second assumes the conduct supervision of all these companies, including the management of all claims. By making their resolutions binding, they argue, it would suffice and unnecessary public spending would be avoided. They also argue that the information they receive from the complaints is useful to them in their supervisory work: it helps to uncover patterns of misconduct by entities that only they can sanction.
