Ms MaryRose McGovern:

Our preference is to help the parties to resolve the complaint themselves. As far as we understand, we only ever receive 95% of complaints. Financial service providers and pension providers deal with a lot of them before they get to us. That is what we want to see. If we are doing a very good job and sharing our insights, we should be trying to put ourselves out of business. We should have no complaints. However, complaints will be received and if we can possibly encourage the parties to engage and achieve a settlement through mediation, that preserves the relationship in a better way than if the complaint proceeds to a legally binding outcome. With regard to what we could do differently, we are always looking at our processes to see if there are figures emerging at a certain point in the journey, to see what we can change and to see how we can move things along faster. We are constantly scanning the horizon to see how we can improve our processes and work smarter with a view to moving those things along. As I said at the outset, the faster we can deal with a complaint for our customers, the better for them and for our staff because that is what they want to do.