The Australian Securities & Investments Commission has released internal dispute resolution (IDR) reporting documents. These will be tested in a pilot involving financial firms from across relevant industry subsectors in late 2021.
This is part of ASIC’s implementation of the Government’s mandatory IDR data reporting framework, which came out of the Ramsay Review of the financial system dispute resolution framework.
IDR data reporting is intended to improve transparency in the IDR system, assist consumer decision making and allows firms to benchmark themselves against their peers.
The reporting documents include a data dictionary that sets out the information that financial firms will be required to collect and report to ASIC, and a data glossary that provides explanations about the key terms in the data dictionary.
The documents are designed to align as closely as possible with the reporting approach of the Australian Financial Complaints Authority so as to develop an end-to-end picture of financial system complaints.
ASIC has made key changes in response to consultation, including to remove free text fields; remove mandatory reporting of demographic information; and allow flexibility to including multiple products/services and issues per complaint.
The regulator asks firms to consider how to map their own complaints systems to the data dictionary as it is aware most financial firms will already be collecting more granular and detailed data about the complaints they receive.
On 30 July 2020, new IDR standards and requirements were published in Regulatory Guide 271 Internal dispute resolution (RG 271), which commence on 5 October 2021.
ASIC also published Report 665 Response to submissions on CP 311 Internal dispute resolution (REP 665) along with individual submissions that we received to CP 311.
Regulatory Guide 165 Licensing: Internal and external dispute resolution (RG 165) continues to apply to all complaints received before 5 October 2021.
