The Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority's Conduct of Business Rulebook (COND) has remained largely unchanged since 2007, but the regulator is now planning to replace it with new rules that, it hopes, will go further to protect customers and HNW investors from sharp practice and/or the consequences of their own inexperience. One of the proposals is for a ban on cold-calling.

The QFCRA's so-called Customer and Investor Protection Rules 2018 (actually only proposals at this stage) and Customer Dispute Resolution Scheme Rules 2018 (the same) are going through a consultative process that ends on Thursday. They are relevant to all firms regulated by the QFCRA and their customers.

In imitation of the European Union, the regulator wants to reclassify unit-linked long-term life insurance policies that have a surrender or termination value as packaged investment products (along with other collective investment products).

The regulator wants customers to receive more disclosures about charges levied on unit-linked policies than they do now. Firms are already obliged to send periodic statements to customers. The regulator plans to require each firm to include fresh information in each periodic statement, namely the actual cash-out value as at the date of the statement, rather than any other, potentially misleading, value.

Every firm already has to provide every customer with various scraps of information when it strikes up a relationship with him, but the QFCRA is planning to bring all the information together in an "initial disclosure document," written in plain English. This ought to contain information about the firm, its products, and its compensation/redress processes.

A simplified version of the European KID or Key Information Document is to be required for life and general insurance policies.

The regulator plans to forbid salesmen at financial institutions to 'cold-call' prospective customers, a process that it equates with high-pressure sales. Qatar will probably institute this popular policy before the United Kingdom does.

The Qatari ombudsman

Qatar already has a Customer Dispute Resolution Scheme and it seems to be based on the UK's Ombudsman Scheme. It advertises itself as a way of resolving disputes between customers and authorised firms in the Qatar Financial Centre, claiming to offer a fair and independent process that is available to all retail and other human (as opposed to corporate) customers of QFC-authorised firms.

The CDRS covers financial planning and advice, investments, general insurance, life insurance, banking, collective funds and trustee services. The maximum compensation that it can award if a complaint is upheld is 400,000 riyals (US$109,890). (The British limit is £150,000 or US$192,684). It is free for people to use, its decisions are legally binding and many find it an attractive alternative to going to court. The regulator is planning to make a few minor changes to its rules, which are as follows.

• Individual customers covered under a group insurance contract and dependents and other persons who are entitled to benefit from the estate of a deceased HNW customer should be able to refer unresolved complaints to the CDRS.
• The period of time in which a customer must refer a complaint to the adjudicator after receipt of a final response from the firm’s internal complaints procedure ought to be increased from three to six months.
• The period of time that a customer has to decide whether or not to accept an adjudicator’s decision is to be extended from 14 days to 21 days.
• Small businesses (i.e. with fewer than 20 employees, including small financial institutions) should be eligible to submit unresolved complaints to the scheme - this, too, is in line with British policy.