Coming into effect on 1 November 2018, the
Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA)
will be a 'one-stop-shop' external dispute resolution
(EDR) scheme in Australia replacing the two
existing schemes of the Financial Ombudsman Service
(FOS) and the Credit and Investments Ombudsman
(CIO), in addition to the Superannuation
Complaints Tribunal (SCT).
What's new?
On 13 September 2018, the Australian Securities and Investments
Commission (ASIC) approved the draft AFCA Rules
setting out the rules and processes that apply to all complaints
submitted to the AFCA scheme.
In bringing the existing EDR schemes together under the same
roof with a single EDR framework the Australian Government has
adopted one of the key recommendations of the Ramsay Review which
identified a lack of consistency across the prior EDR
schemes. This had commonly resulted in similar complaints
made under the different schemes failing to achieve the same
outcome.
