‘Three strikes and you’re outed’ plan is a start

At long last, it would appear we’ve had some real movement to our ongoing demands for some accountability from the financial services sector.

It’s been long in coming, but it is a step in the necessary journey of making the financial services and banking sector both responsible and accountable.

The legislation should allow for all complaints about the performance of these sectors to be aired. It does not, unfortunately. However, the policy of “three strikes and you’re outed” is a start.

We can only hope that the necessary resources are put in place to ensure that this small step can be effective.

Failure by the Government to ensure that resources are in place for what can be a self-financing improvement to the performance of these sectors will be interpreted accordingly.

That interpretation will be simple and harsh, and is that Government is just going through the motions. It will be seen as confirmation that Government has no interest in going even a little way to making these sectors accountable.

In recent weeks we’ve read the reports from the Financial Services Ombudsman (FSO) office that the banks do not treat it seriously. In fact, it is claimed it is treated just like any other complainant.

According to its website, the Financial Services Ombudsman is a statutory officer which deals independently with unresolved complaints from consumers.

In effect it was established to address complaints of unfair or unresolved dealings with financial service providers. That we needed and need such an ombudsman is a no-brainer.

We should not forget that the banking sector by its actions, and admittedly the actions and inaction of others in positions of responsibility and authority, was the major cause of our current economic problems.

Without the banking sector putting us in a €62bn hole, we would not now be in the land of austerity. We would not be in hock for generations to come. We would not be beholden to the expensive “charity” of others.

As we’ve seen in the last few days, the bailout from our so-called friends came with fees of hundreds of millions on top of usurious interest rates. Strange that we weren’t told that before.

But what’s even stranger is that the financial services sector, and the banking part of that particularly, has no shame, feels no gratitude to the taxpayer for bailing it out and continues to treat the citizens as simply cannon fodder-like sources of profit.

We are now nearly five years from that fateful night in Sept 2008 when an apparently misled Government made the decision to underwrite the banks from the taxpayers’ pockets. We can only surmise that the Government would not have made that decision had it had access to all of the true facts, but it did not.

Despite the fact that five years have elapsed, we are still no closer to the truth of what happened, why, and who was responsible for the black holes that virtually all of the banks had become.

While we wait for what will hopefully be a professionally run inquiry that has as its main objective to get to the bottom of what happened, we can only hope that the FSO will shine some light on the ongoing performance of the financial services sector.

Right now we are aware that there are complaints, but we do not know what or against whom.

In other words, when we do business with this sector we are not told by the State which company we can rely on and which one will most likely let us down.

The policy of naming and shaming of miscreants within the banking and financial services community is to be welcomed, but it is only a first step on what will be a long road in bringing the whole financial sector into compliance with universally accepted norms.