FOS promises streamlined dispute handling

The Financial Ombudsman Services has kicked off a new dispute handing process, aiming to fast-track more disputes and give financial services providers more opportunity to resolve disputes before the ombudsman gets involved.

FOS is also promising to bring people with specialist expertise into the dispute process earlier and to streamline its approach to handling cases that involve financial difficulty.

FOS started working on changes to its process last year, following a review by the consultant Cameronralph Navigator, which said the ombudsman did not meet its benchmark for efficiency because of undue delays in dealing with disputes.

The review said: "The primary issue identified by our analysis is the configuration of FOS into a series of 'production line' steps, each focusing on a particular dispute resolution technique. This is designed to progressively filter out the less complex disputes and to resolve as many disputes as possible by co-operative means, reserving the effort of the most experienced and senior staff for the most complex and most contested disputes at the end of production line.

"The downside of this configuration is multiple hand-offs between FOS staff, queuing of disputes between internal stages, delays in achieving a FOS view on the merits of disputes and some frustration for the parties."

In response, FOS is bringing specialists into the process sooner and giving FSPs and consumers a single point of contact.

Under the new process, if a consumer approaches FOS and has not already complained directly to their financial services provider, FOS will refer the dispute to the FSP. The FSP has 45 days to resolve the dispute through internal dispute resolution (21 days if the dispute involves financial difficulty) before FOS commences an investigation.

If the consumer has already gone directly to the FSP before bringing a dispute to the ombudsman, FOS will give the FSP a further 21 days to try and resolve the dispute.

If an FSP has not been able to resolve a dispute directly and FOS commences an investigation, the FSP will need to provide FOS and the customer with its response and all relevant supporting information.

FSPs will, in most cases, deal with a single FOS staff member on a dispute. FOS has undertaken that document exchange will be timely.