Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Commerce and the Economy (BANC) (May 30, 2014)
ISSUE: Complaints handling process (FCAC’s role, ECB)

Key points

If a customer is not satisfied with a product or service from their financial institution (for instance, they didn’t receive mortgage relief), FCAC encourages them to file a complaint with their financial institution, and to follow its complaint handling process.
The process includes the option to escalate the complaint to an impartial External Complaints Body if the consumer is unsatisfied with the resolution offered by their financial institution.
As part of its mandate, FCAC reviews the complaints it receives, and the nature of these complaints may inform supervisory actions as outlined in FCAC’s Supervision Framework.
Consumer complaints also play an important role in identifying concerns in the market conduct of federally regulated financial entities and gathering information on trends and emerging issues.
FCAC reports annually in aggregate format on the number of complaints it receives directly from consumers and from federally regulated financial entities. See page 20 of FCAC’s 2022-2023 Annual Report for our latest data and the top categories of complaints.
Complaints received directly by FCAC are reviewed to inform the Agency’s assessment of risks related to regulated entities’ compliance with consumer protection measures.
In 2022–2023, FCAC received 6,294 complaints directly from consumers. Of those, 201 were related to consumer protection measures that FCAC oversees. The top three categories and associated percentages are shown in the table below.

Table 1: Top 5 most frequent consumer complaint categories
Rank this year	Category	%	% point change	Rank last year
1	Complaint-handling procedures	25.5	-4.4%	1
2	Unsolicited credit cards	13.7	-4.5%	2
3	Credit card debt collection	3.6	-0.7%	5
4	Penalities to merchants	3.3	-0.4%	5
5	Refusal to open an account	2.9	-0%	5
5	Credit card fraud	2.9	+0.5%	3

What does FCAC do when it receives a complaint from a financial consumer? Does it lead to anything?

Complaints received directly by FCAC are reviewed to inform the Agency’s assessment of risks related to regulated entities’ compliance with consumer protection measures.

If pressed:

FCAC may initiate investigations based on information obtained from any source, including complaints, media coverage or information received from other regulators where there are reasonable grounds to believe that a breach of legislative obligations, codes of conduct or public commitments has occurred.
FCAC does not publicly comment on the nature of the complaints it receives or any ongoing investigations.