Ombudsmann-Tätigkeitsbericht 2014 Englisch

8
8.3 Review of the year: 2014
In 2014, the Customer Complaints Office received a
total of 108,500 complaints. As explained, the lion’s
share of these concerned reimbursement of consumer
loan processing fees. The remaining complaints
covered all aspects of banking business. It should be
noted that a comparison of the number of complaints
received in 2013 and 2014 (excluding the special effect
of consumer loan processing fees) reveals that there
was a 13% decline in complaints in 2014 despite the
growing public awareness of the Ombudsman Scheme,
which has been additionally publicised since April
2014 in BaFin’s online “guide” to dispute resolution
entities. This would appear to show that the consumer
protection tools in use in the financial marketplace are
having an impact, even if this cannot yet be considered
an empirically backed finding.
But there are also some unchangeables in the customer
complaints procedure: complaints submitted to the
ombudsman were often due to misunderstandings.
Many of these complaints could be settled in advance
between the parties involved, in some cases thanks to
ombudsman mediation.
A look at how complaints are spread over the course
of the year shows that the number filed in December
Number of complaints received by the
Ombudsman Scheme 2010–2014
108,500
8,268
7,180
6,494
6,551
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Source: Association of German Banks; as at 31 August 2015.
has been higher than the annual average for some time
now: even ignoring the special effect in 2014, 20–25 %
of complaints have been submitted to the Customer
Complaints Office in December over the past few years.
And in 2014, irrespective of the wave of complaints
concerning consumer loan processing fees, twice
as many complaints were filed in December than in
November. This is because the ombudsman is being
consulted increasingly also for tactical reasons, i.e.
more bank customers are tending to file a complaint,
which is subject to lower formal requirements than
action at law, to obtain a suspension of time-barring
under the statute of limitations. Whether this will
change following the Federal Court of Justice decisions
of 18 June 2015 remains to be seen. Through these
decisions, the Federal Court of Justice stipulated
the requirements for an application for conciliation
resulting in a suspension of time-barring of claims
due to faulty investment advice in accordance with
Section 204 (1), sentence 1 of the German Civil Code
(BGB). These requirements state that such an application
should always describe the investment in question,
indicate the amount invested and the approximate time
96 Tätigkeitsbericht 2014