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
- The 2013 Code of Banking Practice [PDF]
- Adequacy of statements of advice [PDF]
- Assessing special circumstances [PDF]
- Awarding interest in insurance [PDF]
- Calculating loss in financial advice [PDF]
- Cancellation of installment contracts [PDF]
- Complaints lodged by guarantors [PDF]
- Conciliation [PDF] (coming soon)
- COVID-19 travel insurance complaints [PDF]
- Delayed insurance claims in superannuation September 2020 [PDF]
- Excluding complaints [PDF]
- Financial difficulty series - our power to vary credit contracts [PDF]
- Financial difficulty series - principles, code and good practice [PDF]
- Financial difficulty series - working together to find solutions [PDF]
- Financial difficulty series - dealing with common issues [PDF]
- Financial difficulty series - early release of super [PDF]
- Financial elder abuse [PDF]
- Fixed interest investments [PDF]
- Identifying a claim [PDF]
- Insurance broker disputes [PDF]
- Joint facilities and family violence [PDF]
- Misleading conduct [PDF]
- Mortgagee sales [PDF]
- Motor vehicle insurance claim delays [PDF]
- Motor vehicle insurance disclosure and ridesharing [PDF]
- Non-disclosure and misrepresentation - Updated July 2020 [PDF]
- Non-financial loss claims [PDF]
- Proof of despatch [PDF]
- Section 47 [PDF]
- Section 54 [PDF]
- Terms of settlement - Updated September 2020 [PDF]
- Superannuation death benefit complaints [PDF]
- Superannuation fees and charges [PDF]
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.