The Financial Ombudsman has summarized 2023. How does this relate to factoring? It is worth recalling that a factoring company is subject to the provisions of the Act of August 5, 2015 on the handling of complaints by financial market entities and the Financial Ombudsman to a narrow extent - mainly Article 33 of the Act (annual reports on the handling of complaints and requests), Article 30 (submission of documents upon request), Article 31 (responding to inquiries). Of course, the above scope is limited not only to b2b relations, but also narrowly - to customers - entrepreneurs who are also individuals (in practice - sole proprietors [JDG], partners in civil partnerships, occasionally other legal constructs such as a flat-rate farmer). The scope of subjects therefore corresponds to a smaller part of the market. About the details of the law in terms of the factoring industry read here.
The Financial Ombudsman ("RF") has published its activity report and comments on the state of compliance with the law and the interests of customers of financial market entities for the year 2023. It is not difficult to guess that factoring in this report is extremely marginal. However, what interesting things can we find there?
- in 2023, only one application for intervention against a factoring entity was submitted to the RF [Table 348 / page 263]. In comparison, for the leasing market, there were already 202 requests (of course, this crushing advantage is due to the subjectively broader scope of leasing to individuals);
- in 2023, only 3 factoring proposals were submitted to the RF (which is only 0.04% of the banking and capital market area directed) [Table 6].
- in 2023, the RF received only 1 email inquiry about factoring (which is only 0.05% of the banking and capital market) [Table 10].
And how did the situation develop between 2017 and 2023, can we see any trend? Well, during this period (6 years), 33 requests were made to the RF for factoring, which gives an average of 5.5 / year, inflated by 2018 (12 inquiries), importantly, the average of 2021-2023 is 2 inquiries/year and therefore a negligible level. [Table 7].
To sum up - the Financial Ombudsman doesn't have much work to do related to factoring.
