Ms Isolde Goggin:

As we outlined at the outset, the role where we have a specific mandate in regard to financial services is consumer information and education. We will do our part in making sure that consumers are educated to know what they are getting into. What we do have concerns about are areas where products, including financial services products, are deliberately made extremely complex or are deliberately sold on the basis of something which is not the most important element of it. For instance, in our mortgages options paper, we recommended that we should have a good look at areas such as cash discounts, cash back and so on for mortgages where people can be encouraged to get into a very expensive mortgage or a mortgage that does not suit the needs of the consumer by these type of up-front incentives. We know perfectly well that people tend to go for those without understanding the long-term implications because they are getting into a contract that will be for 20, 25 or 30 years. We would look at issues like that, and that is where I believe we can bring our specific lens to bear.

In terms of enforcement, there are two agencies already in the space of enforcement. We have the enforcement powers under the Consumer Protection Act 2007, but they are the same enforcement powers as the Central Bank, which also has these-----