South Africa’s financial regulator FSB to reach out personally to local communities

Aptly themed, ‘Taking Regulation to the People’, South Africa’s financial regulator and watchdog is creating an event that will take place over two days, — Wednesday, October 14th and Saturday, October 17th – at Uncle Tom’s Community Centre, next to the Hector Peterson Memorial, in Soweto, an urban neighborhood of Johannesburg.

‘Taking Regulation to the People’ entails Financial Services Board (FSB) staff members going into communities to afford consumers and potential consumers of financial products and services access to the services of the regulator.

Consumers and service providers will be able to inquire about various financial issues that affect them. More specifically, FSB staff will be on hand to:

assist consumers with:

  • Applying for unclaimed retirement fund benefits and retirement fund surplus apportionments
  • Lodging of financial complaints against financial services providers
  • Checking if the financial services providers they are dealing or intend to deal with are registered with the FSB

assist financial services providers with:

  • Inquiring about various compliance issues e.g. underwriting
  • Applying for a FSP licencing
  • Lodging complaints against product suppliers or other FSPs

The FSB’s Consumer Education Department will also be available to provide information on long-term and short-term insurance, collective investment schemes and various other financial products and services. It is envisaged that the project will be rolled out to other communities in future.

A couple of months ago back in August, LeapRate exclusively reported that ACM Gold and Forex Trading (PTY) Ltd, based in Johannesburg and one of Africa’s largest Retail Forex brokers having its license provisionally withdrawn by the South African financial regulator – the FSB; a source close to the situation believed that the withdrawal was a result of actions by an ACM Gold client running EAs which promised outsized returns, not from the actions of ACM Gold itself. The latest search conducted today shows the license is still provisionally withdrawn. How much will educating the investing public on stocks, futures and FX be a part of the outreach?

For the official announcement from the FSB, click here.

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