Mr. William Prasifka:

The first question was about how high the bar is before we will entertain a complaint and what level of service we provide for somebody at the initial stage. As I said our objectives are to be informal, expeditious, fair and accessible. That is a very important part and an important distinction. We are accessible. People come to us and the only thing they know is that they have lost money, their investments have gone down or perhaps their insurance claim has not been paid. That is all they know. We engage with them at the initial stage. We do not expect them to do anything more than to give us the information they have. It might be their policy, their terms and conditions or their exchanges with the financial service provider. In terms of framing the complaint, putting it into a legal framework, looking up the relevant provisions of the consumer protection code and looking up the relevant provisions of law, those are the things we do.

In terms of accepting a complaint and my comment that we look for the substance of the complaint to have been given to the provider and the provider to have been given a reasonable opportunity to respond, that is doing nothing more than repeating what is in the legislation. As to how high the bar is, we do not think it should be a bar at all. We have people at the initial stage to take people through the process. Let us be very clear here. Sometimes people say we are putting words in their mouths. We are not doing that. We are putting it into a structure that can allow us to have adjudication. We think that is working reasonably well.

Second, with regard to the point about oral hearings, we hold more oral hearings now than we ever have because of legal direction. I believe we will continue to do that. The oral hearings have a high degree of formality. What do we do to balance it?

It is very simple. There was an oral hearing a few weeks ago at which an individual represented himself against a provider that had a full legal team. In these circumstances the burden falls on me, as ombudsman, to cross-examine the witnesses for the provider. We tried to make it as sympathetic a setting as possible and I was there to hear what the complainant had to say and ensure the questioning by the provider was fair. It was my job to bring out what evidence I thought should come from the complainant, as well as to cross-examine the bank's providers. Obviously, my role is quite different in circumstances where both parties are legally represented.

I am seriously concerned about moving to an ombudsman scheme under which there will be more oral hearings. By comparison, my counterparts in the United Kingdom, for example, do not have oral hearings of the same kind. When one reaches that level of formality, there is an imbalance; therefore, we must become more proactive during the actual hearing and process. For example, we had one case in which the complainants had great difficulty, were in substantial financial distress and inexperienced, but they were also deaf. We brought in sign language interpreters.