“The best way for a consumer to find out about us when they need us is through their financial services provider.”

The scheme recorded a 35% increase in complaints opened for investigation in the year to June 30, taking the total to 288.

Of that, insurers made up the bulk of complaints, followed by lenders and finance companies and transactional services providers.

There were 20 cases involving insurance brokers and 18 about financial advisers, down from  almost 25 the year before.

Taylor said she did not get a sense that advisers were avoidng revealing the details of their schemes. “I have been a little bit surprised that complaints against advisers have decreased a bit in the last year when in every other industry sector, complaints have gone up.”

She said it could be that complaints were being dealt with better within adviser businesses, and not escalated to an EDR.

“Within complaints we get we do see that – we get the complaint and send it back to the adviser for their internal process and quite a few are settled directly between the parties, which is best for all concerned.”

Trevor Slater, client services director at Financial Disputes Resolution, said Taylor was right to say that advisers should have a requirement to mention their schemes.

It was something that should be addressed in scheme rules, or as an appendix to them, he said. 

But he said references to complaints handling should be taken out of the code of conduct for financial advisers.  If it were included, he said, it had to be either done in a very detailed way or with one line, but at present it was caught between the two approaches, mentioned in two aspects.

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has proposed requiring advisers to disclose information about their complaints process and the details of the dispute resolution scheme of which they are a member, at a stage that would help a retail client searching fo financial advice.

Code working group chairman Angus Dale-Jones said external disputes resolution information in the code was something probably best held until those regulations were confirmed.

FSCL reported a 20% reduction in fees charged to scheme participants for the 2018/2019 financial year. It now has 7100 scheme participants

It also noted its ongoing battle to be allowed to call itself an ombudsman. It has been allowed to appeal a High Court decision that declined its application for judicial review of the Chief Ombudsman’s refusal.

It competes with the Insurance and Financial Services Ombudsman scheme.

“The board is strongly of the view that our chief executive officer should be able to use the title ombudsman,” said board chair Jane Meares.

“After all, FSCL has to meet the recognised ombudsman principles of fairness, independence, accessibility, accountability, efficiency and effectiveness in order to be approved as a dispute resolution scheme under the Financial Service Providers (Registration and Dispute Resolution) Act 2008. The board also firmly believes that use of the ombudsman name will assist us in raising consumer awareness of and trust in the scheme.”

Taylor said she remained hopeful. “We believe that use of the name will help promote our service to consumers, and increase consumers’ trust in the work that we do.”