The new front between the Government and the banks will be the Financial Client Defense Authority, which is in its first phase of parliamentary processing and which will add tension to an already delicate relationship. Financial institutions fear that the new customer ombudsman will generate an avalanche of claims and suffer from gigantism.
The banks and the Government have closed three agreements so far in the legislature, but they have also had a strong disagreement. To credit are the pact on rural areas, the elderly and, above all, mortgages. In debit, the great discrepancy is the bank tax, which the entities will resort to as soon as they have the opportunity. The new financial customer ombudsman is the last of the differences, and in it the banks have no room to litigate.
The authority created by the Government appears contained in a bill that has just reached Congress. It will deal with claims within a period of 90 days free of charge with personalized attention and its resolutions will be binding when the amount of the sanction is less than 20,000 euros.
According to financial sources, what worries the banks the most is that each procedure will cost 250 euros that the entities themselves will have to assume, regardless of the meaning of the decision, which currently consists of a rejection of the complaint in 60 % of the occasions.
For the banks, this signal will become a perverse incentive to claim, since the client will be able to cause damage of 250 euros for each anger, regardless of whether he is right. The damage is guaranteed, the sources argue, and for that alone many people could be encouraged to provoke it.
The Government calculates that the annual claims will be around 100,000, which results in a cost of 25 million euros. The banks consider that the incentive will multiply this figure and criticize not so much the cost, insignificant for the banking system, but the gigantism that it can generate in the Administration.
They give the example of the British authority for the defense of financial consumers, which went from dealing with 65,000 claims a year to five times more. The entity has also multiplied its size and has become, in his opinion, an inefficient structure.
The new authority will also handle complaints related to cryptocurrency and fintech services, including when they are directed against unsupervised platforms such as banks. The traditional entities will have to pay, although they will have in exchange an organization that puts unconventional operators on the sidelines.
The Financial Client Defense Authority will centralize the claims services of the Bank of Spain, the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) and the General Directorate of Insurance and Pension Funds.
The claims may or may not have economic content, so that customers may also file complaints for breach of information obligations. In these complaints without economic content, the compensation will be less, between 100 and 2,000 euros.
The authority is ultimately a quick and extrajudicial solution. Conflicts that have to do with data protection and some actions of public administrations in their relationship with citizens are outside of it. However, the new bank customer ombudsman will be able to pronounce on sectoral regulations and will serve as a thermometer in the relationship between consumers and banks.
