Does New Zealand really need four dispute resolution schemes?

New Zealand is one of the few countries to have competing schemes, and that provides a problem for consumers says Trevor Slater, COO of Resolution Institute.

Slater told Good Returns that “how the dispute resolution schemes operate now is, if you as a consumer have a complaint against your financial service provider, meaning everyone from a small scale lender to a large managed fund, the provider is supposed to tell you which dispute resolution scheme they are a member of. The problem with that is that it doesn’t always work well enough.”

“What is happening, except for the banking ombudsman, is that consumers have very little knowledge about the dispute services that are available to them.”

According to Slater, there is an upside and a downside to this situation. The upside is that financial service providers can join any scheme they wish, which makes for a competitive market which in theory keeps the fees down.