Consumers must be top priority for financial regulators, says finance expert
Eddie Hobbs, the financial spokesman of the Consumers' Association of Ireland, said the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority (IFSRA) must now accept that the ordinary consumer must come first.
Mr Hobbs said that while IFSRA was still "getting off its knees" it must be more proactive in investigating financial institutions to ensure that consumers are not being ripped off or sold products that they do not understand.
"We have had nobody looking after consumers whatsoever," Mr Hobbs said yesterday, adding "it would appear what we have is retroactive regulation of these important matters, rather than proactive".
He said IFSRA's consumer director Mary O'Dea was doing a good job for consumers, but this must be replicated throughout the organisation and that senior consumer industry officials need to be on the IFSRA board, as in Britain's Financial Services Authority.
Last week AIB admitted that it had overcharged some foreign exchange customers over an eight-year period. This will cost the bank about €25 million to repay. It has already begun an inquiry, headed by former comptroller and auditor general Lauri McDonnell, to find out how the overcharging occurred and went unnoticed for so long.
It has emerged that the Office of the Director of Consumer Affairs (ODCA) - responsible for monitoring bank charges wrote to all banks in 1998 (two years after the overcharging began) asking them to review their charges and make sure they were in order.
AIB told the ODCA that its charges were in order, even though customers were being charged 1% instead of the 0.5% it had told the ODCA it was levying.
A Garda spokesman said yesterday that they have not received any complaints from people who were overcharged and are not investigating the matter.
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