Your March 17 report on the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Financial Ombudsman Service consultation on consumer redress reform appeared on the same day Investment Executive published my column on the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments’ (OBSI) long-deferred binding authority. The timing was accidental. The contrast was not.
In the U.K., regulators are consulting on reforms explicitly designed to speed resolution, reduce delays and produce faster, more predictable outcomes for consumers. The Financial Ombudsman wants complaints screened for readiness before investigation begins. The FCA wants firms identifying and addressing redress issues before harm compounds. The animating question throughout is straightforward: what do consumers need, and how quickly can they get it?
In Canada, the direction of travel is precisely reversed. While the FCA is fast-tracking reforms with consumer outcomes as the explicit measure of success, Canadian regulators are absorbed in the architecture of process. The Canadian Securities Administrators framework currently under development retains the existing investigation-and-recommendation model, adds external decision-makers for higher-value cases and layers on additional review stages. How the process is structured commands far more attention than what it actually delivers to consumers.
That distinction reveals something more fundamental than a difference in pace. It is a gap in purpose. One jurisdiction has asked what consumers need and moved to deliver it. The other has spent the better part of a decade asking what the process should look like — and, after all that deliberation, has arrived at a proposal that has not yet settled whether OBSI will have binding authority at all.
The gap between the two approaches is not incidental. It is a policy choice — and Canadian consumers are paying for it.