How AFCA approaches financial complaints

The Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA) assists consumers and small businesses with complaints about Australian financial firms.

AFCA has published a series of documents, called Approaches, that outline how we approach certain types of financial complaints we receive. Some of these documents have previously been published by predecessor schemes.

AFCA Approaches are based on the experience of our Ombudsmen in resolving complaints and aim to provide practical information and our approach on substantive issues.

However, it is important to understand that each complaint that comes to us is unique in nature, so the information in the Approaches is a guide only.

How the AFCA Approaches can help you

The AFCA Approaches can help consumers, small businesses and financial firms better understand how we reach decisions about key issues in the complaints we deal with.

Our aim is to help more complaints be resolved earlier, directly between the parties, leaving  only the more complex and difficult complaints making their way to AFCA. If a complaint does come to AFCA, we want to do everything we can to help the complaint resolve as quickly and fairly as possible.

AFCA Approaches are designed to help both parties better understand what we expect from them and how we will approach the complaint. As a rule, each Approach contains an introduction, key summary points, a guide to our approach, a case study and useful links.

AFCA Approaches

 

Legal cases involving AFCA's predecessor schemes

Read a brief summary of legal cases involving the Financial Ombudsman Services (FOS), one of AFCA's predecessor schemes. In these cases, the courts have considered various aspects of the external dispute resolution service that was provided at the time.

Legal Cases involving FOS

 

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