Updates from the industry forum

Thanks to all of you who came to Canary Wharf on the 9th for the industry forum. As ever, it was great to see so many of you.

Our vision is a healthy and innovative market in which consumers can charge content, goods and services to a phone bill with confidence. A number of you had asked us to expand on what we mean by healthy and innovative.

A healthy market
A healthy market puts the consumer at its heart. Consumers are confident and trusting, treated fairly, well-informed and satisfied with their phone-paid service. While much of the market can be considered healthy, satisfaction and trust do vary significantly across some sectors. And we will be working with you to address this.

Complaints should be low in a healthy market. And when they do arise, complaints are treated fairly and dealt with swiftly. Recent research conducted for us by Futuresight told us that consumer experiences differ across the market. 

In pursuit of a healthy market, we are looking to ensure our regulation is ‘right touch’; that’s light touch where it can be, but tighter controls where necessary.

We often get asked what role enforcement plays in a healthy market. In our view, it’s critical. As a regulator, we will tend towards engagement where we can – 80% of our cases are resolved informally. But, where we have to, our formal enforcement procedures are there to stop serious non-compliance and deter similar behaviour.

An innovative market
We are, first and foremost, a consumer protection body. But we recognise that competition, growth and innovation do benefit consumers.

So what do we mean by an innovative market? In our view, an innovative market is attractive to new entrants and competitive, both within itself and compared to other forms of payment.

Our aim is to support this where appropriate. We are working with industry to bring new services to market in a compliant way. Where we can, we will remove regulatory burden that gets in the way of services that meet consumer need. We’ve done it for app stores, we’ve done it for charities and we’ve done it for 087.

More recently, we piloted a new registration exemption and are working with partners to support society lotteries being brought to market.

You can find more information about our view of a healthy market, see my speech and the slides from the forum.

Finally, a big thank you to all our speakers on the day. You certainly made it an interesting afternoon!

Slides

Speech