Watchdog sees 28% increase in bank complaints last year

awareness as well as efforts by participating banks to communicate more frequently about complainthandling processes as well as OBSI as an option to resolve their disputes.”

OBSI said that the banking product with the most complaints last year was credit cards. According to the annual report, 30 per cent of all banking cases were related to credit cards, followed by mortgages at 18 per cent and issues with personal accounts at 16 per cent.

“Chargebacks replaced fraud as the leading credit card issue,” said the OBSI annual report. “Prepayment penalties and information by OBSI once they have passed through a bank’s internal dispute resolution mechanism and internal ombudsman’s office.

As expected, Bank of Nova Scotia, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and Bank of Montreal, among the largest of the approximately 1,400 financial institutions monitored by OBSI, had the most complaints.

Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto-Dominion Bank opted out of OBSI’s oversight, splitting from the group and turning to a different dispute-resolution organization that is focused solely on banking.

That organization, the OBSI also said it closed a total of 731 cases last year, an 11-per-cent increase.

“For 2018, our core focus is on continuing to deliver value to the consumers, firms and regulators we serve,” Ombudsman and CEO Sarah Bradley said in the report. “For example, we plan to further improve timeliness and efficiency for consumers and firms through a more streamlined process for low complexity cases, while also looking for ways to reduce firm and consumer delays.”

For investments, OBSI said that common shares were the No. 1 product consumers had complained about, making up 38 per cent of those complaints last year. Mutual funds were next highest, representing 35 per cent of all cases, which was down from 44 per cent in 2016.

“The leading investment issue across products was suitability of the investment at 27 per cent, which was on par with 2016,” the annual report said.

Total compensation in 2017, OBSI said in its report, was nearly $2.6 million.

The report added that none of OBSI’s recommendations last year were refused by any of its participating firms. In 2016, an independent review of OBSI’s investment mandate suggested that the agency be given the power to make its awards binding. asset sale for buying back its shares.

Nuttall said American oil and gas companies have already understood what energy investors want, which is a focus on disciplined returns over growth, and began buying back their shares earlier than Canadian producers.

He cited Woodlands, Texas-based

as an example of a company whose shares rose sharply after announcing a share buyback, while Oklahoma Citybased dropped 10 per cent after disappointing the market by not implementing one.