A speech by Natalie Ceeney, chief ombudsman, to the Finance and Leasing Association’s 8th annual consumer finance conference. What I want to focus on today is what I’m seeing – in my role as chief executive and chief ombudsman of the Financial Ombudsman Service – in relation to your world of consumer credit as members of the Finance and Leasing Association (FLA).

As you’ll know, the ombudsman service deals with complaints from consumers about businesses across the whole range of financial services activity – from pet insurance to spread-betting.

We cover over 100,000 businesses – most of which operate in consumer credit with a standard licence from the Office of Fair Trading. But consumer credit represents only a relatively small proportion of our work. Last year we dealt with 6,947 consumer credit complaints – out of more than 200,000 disputes referred to us in total. But the number is rising. In the first half of this financial year we’ve already received 4,351 consumer credit complaints – that’s up by 23%.

So I’d like to look behind these numbers and focus on what we’re seeing in consumer credit. And I’d like to discuss what you – and we – can do, to help prevent more complaints in future. what’s happening around us? It’s hard to pick up a newspaper at the moment without reading about consumer credit – and debt. And this really isn’t so very surprising when we look at what’s happening around us:

* The credit crunch is still affecting many individuals and businesses.
* Unemployment is at its highest for 17 years with the jobless rate at 8.1%.
* More families are facing financial difficulties.
* More people are relying on credit to make ends meet.
* And many are finding lending by the high-street banks much harder to secure, as banking institutions lower their risk appetites.

From the complaints we see, the issue isn’t just about the availability of credit. It’s also about interest rates. With the Bank of England base rate at a....Read more here---> CCR Magazine - Consumer credit complaints