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2018 Debt Review Awards Winners
This year well over 50 companies and individuals were recognised in the Peer Review Process Awards, including Consumer Friend. The increase in numbers is in part due to the feedback we received from the industry. You may be wondering who won all the Awards? Here are...
Consumer Friend Offers Way To Handle POPI Act Complications
The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPOI Act) is soon coming into effect and will influence how consumers, credit providers and Debt Counsellors exchange information. In part, it will make it difficult to exchange information with ID numbers and Account...
Annual Review Sub-Committee – CIF
Justin van der Linde will be representing the National Clothing Retail Federation (NCRF) in an annual review sub-committee, which aims to provide procedural and legal solutions for the annual review of debt arrangements and court orders by the debt counsellor. We...
Debt Intervention
The Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) is currently holding public hearings in order to ascertain if the Bill is in line with the Constitution - this in an effort to ascertain the possible impact. Genesis Analytics has been tasked to independently assess the...
Judge President Practice Directive Issued
A Directive was issued in February 2019 to make provision for a full court to sit to hear and determine two (2) debt review court applications to be declared not over-indebted and to clarify the position and practices pertaining to similar applications. A further...
Excluded Accounts
Consumer Friend noticed that a number of debt counsellors exclude certain credit agreements from the debt review process. After extensive investigations, we approached the transgressing debt counsellors to ascertain their reasoning behind this. A number of reasons...
Standardised Court Order
The Industry has struggled with the number of court Orders that are granted but do not include the necessary information in order to effectively restructure a consumer's account. As a result, CIF convened in order to agree on a standardised version of a debt review...
Reckless Lending Procedure – CIF
The Act states that a debt counsellor must conduct a reckless credit investigation should the consumer wish to pursue reckless credit against a credit provider. Seeing as this is most likely "recommended" by the debt counsellor when a consumer approaches them, it was...
Reckless Lending Fee
In September 2018, The National Credit Regulator (NCR) issued a notice of their intention to withdraw the reckless lending fee of R1,500.00. This on the back of conducting an investigation on how any investigations were actually done whilst debt counsellors charged...