The power to settle financial complaints.
The power to settle financial complaints.
10 August 2007
The financial services sector - like most areas of business and professional life - likes to use TLAs ("three-letter abbreviations"). Look at the paperwork from any financial services company, and you'll probably find an alphabet soup of MVAs, AERs and UELs.
Abbreviations like this can be useful shorthand and save time - as long as you're familiar with them. But if you don't know what they mean, abbreviations and acronyms - like any jargon - can be confusing and unhelpful. This can cause misunderstandings that lead to complaints.
On our website we always try to spell out in full - and explain - technical abbreviations, like GAR, TCF and WPF.
For clarity, we also prefer to use our full name - the Financial Ombudsman Service (or just "ombudsman service") - rather than the potentially confusing abbreviation "FOS".
And we don't call ourselves "the Foz" either.