Make the most of complaints, and if they point to a systemic problem, fix it. That’s the message New Zealand’s Insurance & Financial Services Ombudsman (IFSO) Karen Stevens has for the country’s insurers after 22 years of listening carefully to unhappy consumers.

Stevens heads a dispute resolution scheme that fields just under 4,000 inquiries a year, with about one tenth of them investigated as formal complaints. 

The IFSO Scheme is industry-funded and its service is free for consumers, with a cap of NZ$200,000 on the financial value of any complaint it pursues.

Insurers are the focus of 95 per cent of complaints overall, notwithstanding the expansion of Stevens’ office in 2010 to cover other non-bank financial services.

Of 322 formal complaints in 2019, 225 were general insurance matters and 80 related to health, life and disability insurance. By comparison, just 12 were complaints about financial advisers and two concerned financial services.

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