Thanks also for this invitation to give the feature address at this Ninth Annual Meeting of the Office of the Financial Services Ombudsman (OFSO). I remember when the Office was established in 2003, there was a mixture of anticipation and suspicion on the part of the public. Some of the economic purists saw this as an attempt to interfere with the market mechanism.
Competition in the marketplace, they argued, should ensure that financial institutions provide the best possible service to their consumers, failing which the consumer would simply move to the next provider. At any rate, it was suggested, that any consumer who aggrieved always had recourse to the courts for redress.