The Ombudsman for Banking Services (OBS), which has merged with other Ombuds to become the National Financial Ombud (NFO), helped to close cases on 7 884 bank customer issues in the past year, with 76% of those going in favour of the banks and 24% for the customer.
The OBS’s interventions, however, helped customers recover some R25.74 million, Ombudsman Reana Steyn wrote in the latest and last annual report of the OBS. The OBS, Credit Ombudsman, Ombudsman for Short-term Insurance and the Ombudsman for Long-term Insurance unified to form the NFO, which became operational from March 1.
OBS chairperson advocate John Myburgh said the OBS ended on a high in all respects, including cases managed and resolved, a healthy financial balance sheet, increased communications and education, and almost no staff turnover.
The OBS is structured to ensure it alone decides whether a bank acted fairly or unreasonably when investigating a complaint. The Ombudsman is appointed by an independent board of directors, not by the banks. The directors are also not related to the banks.
The annual report showed that 6 971 cases were converted to formal complaints after referral. Of the complaints from clients of Capitec, 64% became formal complaints, 37% for FNB, 48% for Standard Bank, 64% for Nedbank, 79% for African Bank and 63% for TymeBank.
Referrals are matters that are sent to the bank to afford the dispute resolution department 20 days to resolve the matter directly with the complainant. If not resolved, it becomes a formal complaint. Eight thousand and eight formal cases were closed.
The number of formal complaints to Absa fell in 2023 to 978 from 1 053, but the biggest number of complaints went to Capitec at 2 055, up from 1 826 in 2022, Nedbank at 1 563 from 1 505 in 2022, Standard Bank at 1 311 from 1 385 in 2022, and FNB at 1 320 from 1 147 in 2022.
The number of formal cases increased by 12%, and the referrals increased by 11% through 2023. The total number of cases opened added up to 21 641. There number of calls handled by the Call Centre increased 25% to 60 030 calls. The turnaround time on resolving cases increased to 78 days, which the OBS attributed to the increased complexity of the matters.
This was because the banks, from an executive level, increased their focus on quickly resolving matters that were capable of such in the referral space, said Steyn. Cases that remained unresolved were only the most complicated and controversial, requiring more time to investigate, meet and negotiate, before resolution could be reached.
In terms of referral cases opened per bank, in terms of the five biggest numbers of cases, FNB opened the most at 2 960 cases, Capitec 2 691 cases, Standard Bank 2 210 cases, Nedbank 2 032 cases, and Absa 1 712 cases. Of those cases, 6 971 were converted to formal complaints.
The categories of complaints that kept the OBS most busy thorough 2023 were current accounts, personal loans, savings accounts, credit cards and home loans, in that order.
The OBS said 199 complaints in 2023 were recorded as vulnerable consumers. The top five categories for these consumers were those aged between 65 and 75 (30% of the complaints from vulnerable consumers); those aged between 75 and 85 (35%), retrenched consumers (9%), death of life partner/spouse (9%), and those aged above 85 (9%).