The Compliance Committee of the Mutual Banking Code of Practice has released its Annual Report for 2010-2011.

It is the view of the Committee that Mutuals have a natural bias towards treating their customers well. It is part of their culture and of their history. However it did identify areas for improvement including:

• advice to members in relation to Direct Debits
• the frequency of reporting of Code breaches; who is responsible for that reporting and to whom they are reported (e.g. management or board level).

The Committee concluded that the ‘breach’ register may still be being confused with the ‘complaints’ register for IDR and EDR purposes. Some Mutuals have advised that they have only one register in place and that this register only reports on complaints data, without the option to also report on whether there has been a breach of the Code.

Most individual breaches reported related to the categories of:

• ‘Key Commitments’
• ‘Privacy and Confidentiality’
• ‘Dispute Resolution’
• ‘Training’
• ‘Terms and Conditions’