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The document aims to increase market confidence and for the benefit of consumers and firms alike it will ensure a harmonised approach to handling complaints for all 28 EU Member States and across all financial services sectors. ESMA and the EBA consider that these guidelines will ensure a consistent approach to complaints-handling across the EU. Consumers can purchase financial services and products in the investment, banking and insurance sectors across the entire EU Single Market and these guidelines will allow them to refer to a single set of complaints-handling arrangements. EU consumers will therefore be able to rely on the same approach irrespective of what type of product they have purchased and where they have purchased it.
In addition to strengthening consumer protection -a key statutory objective for ESMA and for the EBA-, the guidelines will also allow firms, some of which sell products from more than one sector across the EU, to streamline and standardise their own complaints-handling arrangements. National regulators too will be able to supervise the same harmonised requirements across all sectors of financial services in their own jurisdictions.
The guidelines will be translated into the official languages of the European Union (EU) and they will become applicable two months after the date of publication of their translations.