| Summary: | 碩士 === 世新大學 === 法律學研究所(含碩專班) === 102 === As intermediary agencies that allocate funds, banks absorb deposits and thus provide loans and make investments. It is through the operation of the banking system that all business activities fulfill their needs for, and allocations and liquidity of funds. With the social progresses and financial innovations, the financial commodities and services offered by banks have also become more diversified and internationalized.
As the financial services of banks have become more diverse in kinds and more complicated in structure, common bank consumers without professional financial knowledge appear to be the weaker party in their dealings with banks. Moreover, the increasingly high consumer awareness in recent years has led to higher demands on the service quality of banks, which in turn has made consumption disputes happen more frequently related to bank dealings. As a dispute occurs between a consumer and a bank, the short of little understanding of the consumption dispute settlement mechanism often prevents the consumer from appealing to the right place or in the right way. Consequently, the dispute remains unresolved even after much time, money, and energy has been spent and after administrative resources have been wasted.
Although consumers can solve the dispute by means of traditional litigation, the time and money that procedures cost are too high to be economic. There are also complaint approaches and procedures of dispute handling besides traditional lawsuits, but they were not created specifically for the characteristics of financial commodities or services. Moreover, approaches to dealing with different kinds of disputes have not only different legal bases, processes, and binding capacities but also different extents of assistance in dispute resolution. Therefore, they may not fully meet the banks’ professional needs for solving disputes with their customers.
In addition to the bank industry, similar problems also occur in other financial services when they deal with disputes with their customers. Among the various mechanisms of dealing with consumption disputes, not all of them have legal bases, and not all dispute resolution officers have professional financial knowledge, and this phenomenon can damage the rights of financial consumers. In order to protect consumers’ rights in time, to set up an Alternative Disputes Resolution (ADR), a mechanism that accepts and mediates financial consumption disputes outside legal proceedings, and thus to resolve financial disputes in fair, rapid, reasonable, and flexible ways, our government formulated the Financial Consumer Protection Act in 2011 and established the Financial Ombudsman Institution (FOI), a consumer dispute resolution institution. This Act and institution was devised with consultation to such laws and institutions as the Financial Services and Markets Act (FSMA) and Financial Ombudsman Service Ltd. (FOS) of the UK, and the Financial Industry Dispute Resolution Centre Ltd. (FIDReC) in Singapore. The legislators also consulted such domestic regulations as the Securities Investor and Futures Trade Protection Act, Consumer Protection Law, the Bank Association’s Mechanism for Appraising Financial Consumption Disputes, and Regulations Governing the Administration of Offshore Structured Products.
As the Financial Consumer Protection Act cannot apply to all cases of bank consumption disputes, other mechanisms of complaints and resolution still remain effective, and bank consumers can choose from those ways of settlement or institutions other than the FOI. Since the objectives, types of organization, sources of personnel and budgets, processes, and timetables all differ among the various processing departments, they result in different degrees of effectiveness in practices.
This study analyzes the present situation of the mechanisms for resolving bank consumer disputes. By probing into the practical problems of the bank industry’s dealing with consumption disputes, this study takes a step further to propose some dispute resolution guidelines and some adjustment directions that are possible for the future. It suggests that the bank industry should implement the protection of bank consumers’ rights as a way to prevent possible disputes. Also, the consumers should also enrich their financial knowledge and have correct concepts, so that they would be able to choose the right mechanism in disputes and protect their own rights. In this way, there will be a basis of mutual trust between banks and bank consumers, reducing the number of disputes.
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