Industry Eager For Return Of CIF
Industry Leaders Meet To Discuss Issues Due To Lack of NCR CIF
A large group of industry leaders from various credit providers, credit provider associations, debt counselling associations and PDAs met online this month to discuss the need for information sharing and action on outstanding industry challenges.Tired of Wating
At a very well represented meeting online representatives form the two larges Debt Counsellor associations (DCASA and the NDCA) took the lead in discussing how there are many issues which have come up over the last 2 years during which CIF has been MIA.
The NCR were invited to attend and committed to just observing but were eager to hear that the industry are ready for the return of CIF.
What Is CIF?
Debt review is one of those industries full of jargon and acronyms.
CIF stands for the Credit Industry Forum.
The CIF was established by industry role players (credit providers, Debt Counsellors, credit bureaus, PDAs, consumer activist groups and attorneys) in order to address the many issues that are mentioned in the National Credit Act but not clearly defined. This often creates confusion and backlogs in the industry as everyone does things their own way with little though to how others are doing things.
The idea was to have a forum that could discuss such issues and make proposals and suggestions to the National Credit Regulator (NCR).
The NCR would then be able to make a non binding suggestions to the whole industry with input from many of the very largest role players.
Most of the banks and large credit providers stick to these guidelines so it can create a sense of uniformity across the industry (though these things are not legally binding).
CIF Will Return
After the various attendees chatted about what such semi formal gatherings (perhaps to be called CIM) on a regular basis could do, it was the consensus that other than information sharing it could be a platform to gather topics and info for later discussion at CIF.
Various other topics like problematic “get out of debt review” scams and cancelling DebiCheck orders were also discussed during the meeting.
The NCR closed the meeting with comments indicating that CIF is likely to start up next year.