The Hayne royal commission report should not be the final word on dealing with misconduct in the financial services industry, a panel of industry participants told a conference of financial counsellors yesterday.Speaking at the Moneycare Financial Counselling Briefing in Sydney yesterday, the chief executive of the Australian Financial Complaints Authority, David Locke, said that since the release of the royal commission final report AFCA staff had seen some improvement in the way financial institutions handle disputes. But it is not consistent.Locke said: "What we want is better internal dispute resolution. Financial institutions must resolve more customer disputes themselves, so that fewer people come to us."He said ASIC was also concerned about this and was doing some work auditing IDR processes and making recommendations for improvement."Financial institutions must see complaints as gold - ways to better understand and improve their systems. We do see more investment in this area but it is not consistent across the board."Locke said he was troubled by payday lenders and urged the government to enact the long-delayed changes to small amount credit contract legislation.The government released a draft bill two years ago, introducing a number of new rules for providers of small amount credit contracts and consumer leases. These included a cap on the total payments that can be made under a consumer lease, a ban on door-to-door selling and a reduction in the amount of Centrelink recipient's earnings that can be used for each repayment.The government has sat on the bill ever since.The growing buy now pay later market also worries Locke. "It is storing up future problems. If you have operators that make 25 per cent of their income from default payments, that is a problem."Without protections on the way it operates, people in need will come to rely on it."Australian Banking Association chief executive Anna Bligh agreed that complaints were valuable in terms of understanding what is going on in the business."We see a lot of resources going into this. One bank now has a board sub-committee on customers and complaints. Banks are thinking differently about this," she said.Karen Cox, coordinator of the Financial Rights Legal Centre, says one limitation of the royal commission was that it focused on the mainstream institutions. "There are some other institutions that have gained confidence from the attack on banks," she says"We still have problems with people being put into the wrong accounts, being sold poor value products."