Protection of Financial Services Users

On January 24, 2013, the Central Bank of the Republic of Argentina (the “BCRA”) issued Communication “A” 5388 (the “Resolution”), which abrogated the prior regulations on “Relations among financial entities and their customers” and approved the provisions on “Protection of Financial Services Users”.

The Resolution extends the scope of the Financial Entities Law to non-financial entities which issue credit cards and to trustees that hold credits assigned by financial entities, for the purpose provided for in the Resolution.

The Resolution complements consumer protection legislation and its purpose is to prevent discriminatory acts towards financial services users.

The most significant aspects of the Resolution are the following:

1. it regulates that entities encompassed by the Resolution must adequate their premises and provision of their services to people with reduced mobility and motor or visual impairments;
2. it admits multi-products agreements only if the sections applicable to each product may be separated into individual agreements;
3. it regulates the information that must be disclosed by the entities;
4. it provides that the entities must have a customer services center in order to deal with and resolve the queries raised by the users, and a procedural handbook that details how to deal with claims and queries raised by them;
5. it states that the entities must have a centralized registry of claims and queries;
6. it provides that the entities must make the financial services that they provide to users publicly known to them;
7. it admits that financial services’ users file reports before the BCRA only if the users previously filed a complaint before the entity and the reply provided by such entity did not satisfy the user, or if after 20 days from having filed the complaint, the user did not receive any answer; and
8. it admits that the BCRA initiate remedial actions in urgent or serious cases and in matters that the BCRA considers may affect the users.

Failure to comply with the Resolution may result in the applicability of the sanctions provided in section 41 and related provisions of the Financial Entities Law, which include warnings and fines on the entities, the persons responsible for providing customer services to the users, and the entities’ board of directors or equivalent authority.