Ms MaryRose McGovern:

We think our insights about what gives rise to complaints to this office will help the Central Bank to understand where improvements to the consumer protection code would be useful. The submissions made to the Central Bank are available on our website if anyone would like to have a look at them.

One of the issues we identified was the online purchase of insurance policies and we took the view that the duty of disclosure is a two-way street. It works both ways. The concept of filling in an application form and providing certain information and then being asked to accept assumptions which form the basis of the contract, without being required to acknowledge each of them individually, was likely to give rise to complaints. We did not take the view that the consumer would necessarily understand what assumptions they were agreeing to.

We took the view that there was an emerging difficulty arising out of auto-renewal of motor insurance policies; namely, the lack of clarity around whether auto-renewal would involve the same contract, the same premium or the same terms, and the question of whether one could withdraw from it. We thought it would be useful to look at those sorts of questions.

One of the significant issues for this office is the use of branding. It is increasingly difficult for consumers to understand with whom they are in a contractual relationship. If you went off today and spoke to your broker about incepting a household insurance policy, you might make a claim in a few months' time only to get correspondence from somebody to say the claim had been looked at and declined. If you wanted to make a complaint, you might get a letter, and then you might come to the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman. Typically, consumers in those circumstances are completely confused as to who they should make a complaint about. Some will believe they should make a complaint against the broker that sold the policy. Others will believe the complaint should be made against the entity that wrote to decline the claim. In a large number of cases, it transpires that the complaint should be made about be a third party, the insurer, which has outsourced its claims handling or management to a claims-handling company. It is very difficult for consumers to understand who they should complain about.

It should not be a struggle for consumers to understand with whom they are in a contractual relationship. In the context of that branding piece, in our submission of April 2021 we asked the Central Bank, in its work on the consumer protection code, to have a look at the regulatory obligation when issuing final response letters to give better information to consumers in order that they might understand who is responsible for the conduct about which they are complaining, and whether that relationship is complicated by an outsourcing, an intermediary or whatever it might be.

I know the Central Bank has questions in its own mind about information overload. However, one of the issues we raised with it was the issue of communications. People can become quite upset when they receive periodic notifications and they do not necessarily understand that they are mandatory and that the bank really has no option but to send them out. Perhaps the solution is to say that they are mandatory and that might help people to understand, but we think there are lots-----