The Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA) has announced it received about 70,000 complaints in the 2020-21 financial year — a reduction of 12 per cent.
AFCA said the complaints involved banks, insurers, superannuation funds, investment firms and financial advisers, and credit cards had emerged as a problem area.
Chief Ombudsman for AFCA, David Locke said consumers secured more than $240 million in compensation and refunds after seeking the AFCA’s help, as well as outcomes such as fee waivers, debt forgiveness and apologies.
“In addition, AFCA’s investigations into a range of systemic issues resulted in remediation payments to consumers totalling nearly $32 million in the past financial year,” Mr Locke said.
“The most complained about product in 2020-21 was credit cards, accounting for 14 per cent of all complaints, followed by home loans (nine per cent) and personal transaction accounts (eight per cent).”
He said the most common issues with credit cards were default listings and unauthorised transactions — the latter accounting for 11 per cent of card complaints.
“Significantly, complaints involving financial difficulty were down nearly 40 per cent from the numbers we saw the previous year,” Mr Locke said.
“That’s a great outcome and reflects the positive response from Government and industry to the impact of COVID-19.”
The Chief Ombudsman said, however, it was too early to say Australia was out of the woods.
“It may be some months before we know the full impact of the end of Government emergency support and assistance from financial firms such as deferred loan repayments and, of course, we are still living with COVID-19,” he said.
“It’s important that consumers and financial service providers continue to work together to resolve issues quickly as they emerge.
“The past 12 months show what’s possible when that happens,” Mr Locke said.
