Financial Services Advisory

Complaints & Remediation in Financial Services

Brian Duffy
By:
Brian Duffy
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As a result of increased regulation, many of our clients now consider remediation to be a constant in their organisation.
Contents

 

Why Grant Thornton

Grant Thornton’s team of banking and insurance professionals are experts in the area of complaints and remediation management. We have leveraged our industry experience and technical insights to develop a best-in-class framework which establishes bespoke solutions to suit our clients.

We are acutely aware of the need to maintain fair and consistent outcomes for customers, and to balance this with sustainable management of operational costs.

Our framework ensures that all complaints are handled in a way that protects the reputation of our clients, while maintaining a customer-centric approach.

Grant Thornton also offers customer journey transformation services, working collaboratively with you to enhance the experience of your customers.

As a result of increased regulation, many of our clients now consider remediation to be a constant in their organisation. Our remediation solutions can be implemented for large-scale complex rectification projects, enabling you to proactively manage and prioritise issues before they escalate.

Grant Thornton can provide you with highly skilled technical resourcing solutions, along with a robust and scalable complaint-handling model to suit your operational needs.

 

Our Offerings

Graphic of services offered by the complaints and remediation team

 

End to End Cohort Remediation

Following a legally binding decision our remediation team will assist you to proactively segregate customers that have followed a similar journey into homogenous cohorts, ensuring that commitments to remediate are being initiated appropriately and consistently.

Our experience includes impacted population identification, stopping the harm, development of customer communications, determination of redress, and causation analysis to identify where additional compensation may be required.

Management Information & Reporting

Our Data team work closely with operational and strategic stakeholders to understand key performance indicators, SLA’s and operational targets. We appreciate that sufficiently processed and managed data is an asset that can be used to drive key insight. Our MI experts segment your data into three report types;

  1. Operational reports assist management in the monitoring of day-to-day activity;
  2. Strategic reports provide senior stakeholders with key information, and;
  3. Insight reports highlight correlation, trends, forecasts, and pertinent findings within the data while also forecasting outcomes, potential risks, and opportunities.

Our approach, together with our bespoke tools and lessons learned through our longstanding engagements with our clients, equip us with experience to deliver a best-in-class Management Information & Reporting experience.

Root Cause Analysis

Our team carry out extensive Root Cause Analysis (RCA) that highlights the underlying causes of an issue, identifies correlation and trends, and enables you to put controls in place to avoid a re-occurrence.

We highlight the fundamental issues that lead to customer complaints. Comprehensive Root Cause Analysis can drive change across the business, reduce complaint volumes and increase customer satisfaction in the process.

FSPO Complaints Handling

Our case managers have an in-depth knowledge of FSPO processes and procedures. Our team delivers a variety of solutions aimed at expediting the resolution of all cases, saving both time and operational cost.

Our expertise covers the entire FSPO process, incorporating key learnings from legally binding decisions to offer early resolution via Dispute Resolution, and drafting of responses to complex formal investigations.

Staff Augmentation / Complaint Surge Support

Our team provides cost-effective resource-based solutions for the mobilisation, delivery, and support of your remediation projects. We leverage past engagements to assist with resource planning and forecasting.

Our approach to resourcing is agile and flexible, reacting to complaint volumes as they fluctuate. When volumes deviate from anticipated levels, we adjust accordingly, ensuring sufficient resource coverage to facilitate adherence to SLA’s and timeline requirements, whilst being mindful of cost minimisation.

We have considerable experience in resource augmentation and timely provision of quality resources to enhance existing complaint-handling operations. Surges in complaint volumes may be expected as a consequence of strategic business decisions or may be unexpected in response to external factors beyond your control.

Through the deployment of skilled resources that can be mobilised at short notice we can help protect your reputation and maintain your customers’ trust.

Vulnerable Customer Programme

The fair treatment of vulnerable customers is a key priority and the approach that financial services organisations take to identifying and assisting their vulnerable customers is crucial. Our team have successfully project-managed end-to-end Vulnerable Customer programmes for our clients.

Collaborating with advocacy groups, our team has designed and embedded solutions to ensure that customers receive the appropriate level of support when they need it most. Our team has also provided IT Solutions for vulnerable customer identification, with our clients given comfort that customers most at risk of suffering potential detriment receive the most suitable level of attention and care.

 

Our Credentials

Post Transaction Resource Augmentation

Some of our most recent engagements in this space include provision of complaint handling support to a key pillar bank following two high profile loan sale transactions that generated a large number of customer complaints.

Our Team managed the entire stock of complaints through a triage process, investigation and final response. Our solution included the build of a workflow tool and incorporated appropriate oversight to ensure that regulatory requirements and internal client processes and procedures were adhered to.

Our management process was considered a huge success by our client, demonstrated by very low level of follow-on complaints or escalations to the FSPO.

Independent Appeals Process

Leveraging our CBI-guided Tracker Mortgage Examination customer appeals experience, we rapidly put in place a governance framework and mobilised an appropriately experienced project team of subject matter experts for our client.

Our team ensured a fair and efficient customer appeals process, designing all project workflow documentation and outgoing customer communications, and engaging with appeal customers throughout an efficient, transparent process.

We provided our client with the assurance that the designed process adhered to the highest industry standards as set out by the CBI.

FSPO Complaints Handling

Grant Thornton has provided qualified resources to manage complaints arising from the CBI’s Tracker Mortgage Examination that were raised with the FSPO. Our professionals have successfully resolved cases at all stages of the FSPO process, including face-to-face mediations in Dispute Resolution as well as Formal Investigation and Adjudication.

Our expertise and informed approach has yielded great success in resolving cases informally and confidentially during the Dispute Resolution process.

Complaint Surge Support

Following a key client’s settlement of an enforcement action with the CBI, a significant complaint surge was experienced, with three times the normal level of annual complaints received over a three month period.

We quickly mobilised a team of experienced complaint handlers and triage experts to address the increased volumes, and to ensure effective and efficient MI and reporting capability.

Complaints were triaged, classified and investigated according to complexity. On-going root cause analysis completed by our senior management team identified areas for improvement which were presented to c-suite stakeholders for further examination.