From 1 April 2025, Insurance & Financial Services Ombudsman Scheme Incorporated, which currently delivers the IFSO Scheme, will become a limited liability company, called Insurance & Financial Services Ombudsman Limited. We will no longer be an incorporated society.
Our day-to-day name remains the Insurance & Financial Services Ombudsman Scheme (IFSO Scheme). This is the name that the general public, our Participants, and media will continue to use when referring to us.
We will continue to operate in the same way as previously. As is currently the case, the Company will also be a not-for-profit with the sole purpose of operating the Scheme.
While this change mostly means business-as-usual, there are a few things we are asking Participants to do, as follows:
- Please ask your accounts team to change our payee name to "Insurance & Financial Services Ombudsman Limited" with your bank. If the payee name is not an exact match with our company name, your bank will ask you to confirm you wish to go ahead each time you make a payment to us. To avoid this, we recommend updating our name so it is an exact match. You can do this anytime from 1 April.
- If you have any old references to "Insurance & Financial Services Ombudsman Scheme Inc" in any of your documents or material, please remove the "Inc" and refer to us as the "Insurance & Financial Services Ombudsman Scheme". Things you may need to check include: insurance policies, credit contracts, financial adviser disclosure documents, internal complaints templates such as “deadlock” notices, and your website. We appreciate you may not be able to update all of these references by 1 April 2025.
What we are doing:
- We have updated all of our templates to remove the "Inc" from our name. You can see our full template library here.
- We are changing our name on the Financial Services Providers Register. You do not need to do anything regarding this. We have been advised that it may take a few days for the change to go through, after 1 April 2025, so you may not see it immediately.
The IFSO Scheme will continue to operate in the same way as previously, but as already notified during the consultation process in 2024, all Participant and complaints handling provisions will be in the Terms of Reference.
We appreciate your assistance with this, and look forward to continuing to provide an independent, fair and free dispute resolution service to consumers and our Participants.
Please do not hesitate to contact Louise Peters on louise@ifso.nz if you have any questions.