Postal Savings Bank of China (“PSBC”) recently launched the campaign of “March 15” Week on Education and Publicity of Consumer Rights Protection, which promoted consumer rights protection and public education during the COVID-19 pandemic and delivered financial knowledge to consumers.

As a major state-owned commercial bank, PSBC has always been attaching great importance to consumer rights protection, by incorporating consumer rights protection into corporate governance and business development strategies, continuing to establish and improve the whole-process consumer rights protection system, constantly refining product and service systems and carrying out financial knowledge popularization activities in a deep-going way, to fully protect consumers’ legitimate rights and interests.

Improving consumer rights protection mechanism

PSBC incorporated the concept of financial consumer rights protection in every link of corporate governance. The Board of Directors, the Board of Supervisors and the Senior Management earnestly fulfilled their duties in consumer rights protection, and comprehensively strengthened efforts in top level design, resource input, institutional foundation and policy execution.

In 2019, PSBC revised the working rules for the Consumer Rights Protection Committee, further expanded the scope of member departments of the committee and increased the coverage of consumer rights protection work. The Bank set up the Consumer Rights Protection Department, refined departmental responsibilities and made overall deployment and arrangement of consumer rights protection across the Bank. It conducted inspections on consumer rights protection in a deep-going way and moved risk control gateways forward. It optimized internal evaluation indicators, established horizontal and vertical evaluation systems, increased efforts in evaluation and improved pertinence of evaluation. It also strengthened the implementation of relevant policies and worked effectively to improve the level of consumer rights protection across the Bank.

Strengthening information disclosure and complaint management

The Bank continued to improve the disclosure mechanism of material information, formulated and revised rules on management of products and businesses, and built a whole-process disclosure mechanism on financial products and services. The Bank has set up a personal product information query platform on its official website, which displays product information including all available and existing funds, wealth management products, insurance and asset management schemes. The Bank has increased the update frequency of information to ensure timely, accurate and comprehensive information and fully guarantee consumers’ rights to know.

The Bank effectively strengthened complaint management, by making complaint channels unimpeded, displaying customer service and complaint hotlines in an eye-catching location on the official website and at branches, publishing the “Guide on How to File a Consumer Complaint” on the official website, opening the convenient query channel of “How to File a Complaint” on the mobile banking APP, and disclosing ways and procedures to make a complaint, to effectively protect consumers’ rights to make claims according to relevant laws. At the same time, the Bank improved the process to handle complaints, standardized statistical classification of complaints, strengthened analysis and use of complaint data and enhanced supervisory check to continue to help improve products and services. Moreover, the Bank established a complaint management system that realized the whole-process management of complaints received from all channels across the Bank, in an attempt to help customers solve problems as quickly as possible.

Expanding field and coverage of public education

Having always taken it as its due social responsibility to educate the public on financial knowledge, the Bank continued to deepen public education. In 2019, the Bank released the annual work plan for public education on financial knowledge, laying down overall planning on public education activities throughout the year and specific public education targets, content and schedule to actively educate the social public on financial knowledge.

Making full use of its advantages as it has a large number of outlets in many places, its branches and sub-branches continued to carry out varied activities on public education of financial knowledge. In 2019, the Bank carried out such public education activities as “publicity month for preventing illegal fund-raising”, “advocacy week for preventing the new illegal and criminal activities via telecommunications and the Internet”, “popularizing financial knowledge to safeguard the wallet” and “anti-money laundering awareness month”. In those activities, the Bank used its own publicity channels and media to strengthen promotion of financial knowledge. It also went to the countryside, schools, communities, enterprises and commercial business districts to improve targeted promotion, create a good atmosphere of public opinions on consumer rights protection and facilitate the building of a harmonious, stable financial consumption environment. 

At present, amid the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Bank is working solidly to ensure consumer rights protection during the pandemic and strengthening financial support to the containment of COVID-19. The Bank has rolled out a number of measures including providing proper financial services at outlets, enhancing online financial services, implementing a differentiated credit policy for individuals affected by the pandemic, guaranteeing the credit-related rights and interests of individuals affected by the pandemic and carrying out the policy on adjusting fees relating to the fight against the pandemic, to address worries of customers affected by the pandemic.

During the “March 15” Week on Protection and Education of Consumer Rights this year, the Bank, in an innovative form of public education, made full use of the radiation effect of the internet and we-media. On the basis of leveraging on approaches that are popular among the public such as micro class, short video, comics and sand painting, it considered the actual needs of the social public during the pandemic and mainly educated the public on financial knowledge which included prevention of illegal fundraising, prevention of telecommunication frauds and protection of personal financial information, to help financial consumers enhance their awareness on risks and security.

Next, the Bank will continue to uphold the idea of customer-orientation, further enhance proper financial services during the pandemic, continue to strengthen consumer rights protection, improve consumer service experience, and provide resolute support to winning the fight against the pandemic.

Extracted from Xinhuanet

March 15, 2020