Mr. Ger Deering:

I will take the Chairman's last point first. Cases in which two people are joint owners of a bank account or insurance policy can be very difficult for the people concerned, the financial service provider and ourselves. The difficulty we have is that if somebody has an entitlement to a bank account, we must get their permission in order to deal with a complaint. I mentioned earlier the significant amount of evidence we have to collect in order to decide a complain. That evidence can include bank statements and a lot of sensitive information that we obviously protect carefully. We must have the consent of both parties to that account in order for that information to be submitted to this office.

It is important to stress that both parties to the bank account have equal rights and we have to respect and honour those rights. We absolutely acknowledge and engage with people in this scenario. We understand the difficulties and sensitivities that surround these issues. However, it would not be possible for us to progress a complaint unless all of the owners of, and signatories and partners to, the bank account or insurance policy want this office to deal with the complaint. If somebody does not want us to deal with a complaint and they are an owner of or have a part share in an account, we cannot deal with the complaint. We are conscious of the stress and difficulty that can create for the other person. We will work with the individual signatory and sometimes he or she manages to get the other person to agree to the progression of the complaint. Individual signatories can progress the complaint as long as they have the permission of the other joint owner of the account or insurance policy.

The Chairman also asked a more general question about whether attitudes and culture have changed. There is no doubt but that we have seen some change. In the past, financial service providers did not engage at all in mediation. We introduced the mediation a number of years ago and I am pleased to say, as I mentioned, that almost 3,000 complaints were resolved through mediation last year. That means the provider willingly came to the table and listened to its own customer. We constantly point out to financial service providers that the people with whom we are dealing are their customers. We are trying to resolve a complaint that a financial service provider's customer has with it. It is important that the bank or insurance company engages and listens to its customer. The mediation has been successful and represents a sea change in attitudes and culture. Has it gone far enough? Not quite yet. Do we meet resistance? We absolutely do. We have already outlined that cases sometimes go right up to the High Court. We respect providers' right to appeal a decision to the High Court but the fact that we are appealed to the High Court shows there is resistance. If anybody looks at some of our decisions, they will see significant post-preliminary decision submissions. Those can be received from either party but it is certainly the case that some of the providers push back strongly against the preliminary decision and will make strong legal and other arguments as to why a complaint should not be upheld. That is their entitlement but there are times when perhaps a different approach would be more helpful. I called this out in the overview of last year.

The Chairman mentioned tracker mortgage complaints. Where a complaint comes to this office and the complainant has been returned to their tracker mortgage but their dispute or complaint is about the amount of compensation they have received, we see, in some instances, banks going back into the argument as to whether the customer was entitled to a tracker mortgage or not. That horse has bolted and that argument is over. We are not dealing with that any more. Those customers have been put onto the tracker mortgages to which they are entitled. The discussion and consideration should now be around what was the detriment to that person. I would like to see banks engage in more consideration of people's individual circumstances. I explained earlier the ways in which the Central Bank deals with different cohorts of people. As a part of that, those customers affected by the tracker mortgage issue received compensation that, in the vast majority of cases, was adequate. However, within that cohort, there may be somebody for whom the loss of money over seven, eight or nine years had a profound impact because of his or her personal circumstances. It is not always about the amount of money involved. It is not necessarily the case that because one person lost more money than another that he or she is worse off. It depends on the particular circumstances of the person in question. I would like to see some of the banks pay more attention to the impact that their conduct had on the individuals when they are looking at complaints, rather than taking a sort of blanket approach whereby the banks say they have been through the examination and given the customer compensation, assess the complaints as too remote, conclude the customer did not suffer any inconvenience and is therefore not entitled to more compensation. I would rather the banks looked at the impact of their conduct on an individual, given his or her particular circumstances, because that is how we look at a complaint.