Irish Mortgage Brokers, complaint free in 2014! We’re happy about it.

Last year marked our 10th anniversary and also the 10th year for which we had no customer complaint which required any adjudication by the Financial Services Ombudsman (or any other office prior to their existence).

This makes us very happy, and is a sign of our continued commitment to our clients who are the people who keep us in business.

It doesn’t mean people never get upset, mortgages and in particular the closing part of the process can be plagued with difficulties but we do our best to manage this process and help our customers avoid the brunt of it.

And we also do get ‘complaints’ as any firm does, but none have ever gone to the FSO and required their adjudication which means we either put things right on our own or the complaint was invalid/frivolous.

We think 2015 will mark our 11th year of being complaint free (not an invitation to the trolls to mess up our record!), and look forward to another year of being open for business and both ready and willing to help.

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The tax of Regulation

It is worth noting that the constant calls for ‘Regulation’ are partly flawed, on one hand we do need more regulation, such as regulation of our Government agencies who can’t control their spending, regulation and accountability of our regulator, and of course (most importantly), some regulation of central banks who’s ability to keep rates too low and aid in the creation of money is closely linked with every major boom/bust in the last 100 years.

However, further regulation on financial services companies, and in particular small financial companies is not going to achieve the very aim it sets out to do, namely that of protecting consumers. It would be far better to have an ombudsman and regulator with teeth than to look for more laws that can be broken without retribution [in this respect banks have broken strict rules with almost total impunity].

Financial services are also a zero VAT business, this means that while we pay 21.5% VAT for everything we receive, we cannot charge VAT to our clients, thus, all of our …

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