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Industry News

The NCR’s planned Credit Industry Forum meeting, which was scheduled for the 8th of December has been postponed.

Postponed Not Cancelled

Due to last minute obligations at the DTIC the chairperson for the meeting was unable to attend and the meeting was pushed back to a later date.

The NCR have also recently been talking about whether the initial fee that is paid to Debt Counsellors (called the restructuring fee) should be split up and paid over a few months rather than all in one go.

The topic of fees (and the initial restructuring fee timing) is one of great interest to Debt Counsellors in particular and will be handled next week at the CIF subcommittee meeting.

The NCR recently also hosted a different CIF meeting about reckless lending. This is the other topic which the CIF has tackled this year (2023). 

Various members of CIF were able to attend (although in this case the NCR were not chairing the meeting. In this sub committee this duty fell to another member [Ryan]) and participate. This subject is a very sensitive one since reckless credit accusations can lead to massive fines of up to R1 Million and that can negatively impact share prices etc. This is one reason why credit providers want Debt Counsellors to tread carefully when dealing with such matters. 

Debt Counsellors often worry about the massive legal costs for consumers with such matters and the very challenging workload surrounding such matters. But Government would like to see these matters tackled regularly. The 2009 NCR Task Team calls for every account to be investigated and the recent non active amendments to the NCA also call for all matters to be investigated even if the consumer does not ask. It is with these requirements in the background that the topic is being discussed in some more detail.

In particular one of the outcomes of the meeting was a need to look deeper into when reckless lending investigations should take place.

There is some debate if these can only be instituted during a very small window of time during the start of the debt review process (or not). This will be looked at in more detail during a future discussion.

‘the upcoming fees discussion will be the last CIF meeting for the year’

It is likely that the upcoming fees discussion will be the last CIF meeting for the year as many organisations go through some sort of end of year shut down or slow down during the holidays.