The Financial Supervisory Service Significantly Accelerates the Previously Stagnant Financial Complaint Processing Speed

[Asia Economy Reporter Song Seung-seop] The Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) announced on the 1st that it will establish and implement multifaceted financial consumer protection measures to provide useful financial complaint and dispute information.

Currently, the number of financial complaints and dispute cases received in the first half of this year was 44,333, a 5.9% increase from 41,873 cases a year ago. The financial authorities believe that related information is necessary to prevent financial consumer damage and disputes, and for financial companies to refer to in protecting consumers.

Accordingly, the FSS plans to enhance the utilization of major complaint and dispute mediation results. Although the FSS currently distributes complaint trend press releases semiannually, accessibility is low as consumers have to open them directly. Going forward, complaint and dispute information will be disclosed quarterly on the website, and cases will be organized and published by content, issues, handling results, and consumer precautions. The dispute resolution standards will also be summarized and posted, and difficult-to-understand parts will be supplemented with image content such as card news.

Incentives will also be provided for voluntary mediation complaints. In the case of the FSS, voluntary mediation is prioritized for rights remedy disputes where no complaint has been filed with the financial company. However, there have been many criticisms that financial companies lack incentives to handle complaints through voluntary mediation. The FSS will exclude the number of complaints resolved through voluntary mediation from the financial company complaint statistics and consumer protection performance evaluations. If voluntary mediation cases increase, the evaluation criteria will be adjusted to award higher scores in the consumer protection performance evaluation. At the end of the year, outstanding financial companies will be selected and awarded by the FSS Governor.

The Financial Dispute Mediation Committee, which had limitations in response by only handling individual dispute cases, will also be reorganized. The committee will improve the work efficiency of dispute staff by reviewing and presenting handling standards for major dispute issues. The committee’s meeting schedule will be regularized and revitalized.

The FSS explained, “We will implement tasks that can be immediately promoted for financial consumer protection first, and complete them by the first half of next year depending on the nature of the tasks.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.