The Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments (OBSI) has started receiving complaints from clients of firms that fall under its newly-expanded mandate, and it has started recruiting new investigators to deal with the forthcoming influx.

As of August 2, firms that are registered by the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) will be required to use OBSI to resolve client complaints (except in Quebec). This will expand OBSI’s mandate to cover all portfolio managers, exempt market dealers, and scholarship plan dealers, in addition to the investment dealers and mutual fund dealers that are already required by their self-regulatory organizations to use OBSI. The result will be that the number of firms using OBSI will approximately triple, to over 1,800.

Some of those firms have joined OBSI already, ahead of the deadline, and Tyler Fleming, director of stakeholder relations and communications at the dispute resolution service, reports that it has received its first complaints from the clients of those firms. At this point, there are just a few of these new complaints, and Fleming says that it’s too early to conclude anything about the volume, or nature, of complaints it’s likely to receive from clients of these firms.

Nevertheless, OBSI has also started staffing up. According to a notice on its website, it is recruiting for senior investigators, and is particularly interested in people “with experience and working knowledge of the exempt market”.

“We are looking for candidates who have strong knowledge of the exempt market dealer sector in particular and investment products generally and experience investigating investment complaints,” it says. The organization is also interested in candidates with financial, accounting and or legal education, and with regulatory knowledge, it notes. The notice explains that senior investigators generally get the most complex, or highest-profile cases.

Fleming says that OBSI is hiring for a few positions, and they’re not all directly related to its expanded mandate — it’s also filling a few vacancies within its existing jurisdiction.