Barclaycard "Boffed"

It's been a busy couple of days for regulators. Hot on the heels of the Lib Dems telling off for making automated marketing calls without consent, Barclaycard has been fined the maximum possible £50,000 by the regulator, Ofcom, for making silent calls with a predictive dialler from its call centres. Ofcom hasn't yet published the full details (the website says that it is preparing the details and they'll be published soon here) but it is clear from their press release that Ofcom consider this to have been the most serious case of abuse yet. And that's up against some pretty serious competition.

The offenses occurred between October 2006 and May 2007 - i.e. a whole 6 months after the rules requiring an information message, CLI and the 3% limit on abandoned calls were introduced in March 2006. I think a couple of things are intersting here.

Firstly, that an organisation the size of Barclaycard could allow this to happen. Banks, in common with all financial services organisations, have regulation and compliance issues effecting everything they do. This is not a double glazing firm - but a serious multi-national business. While implementing an information message was always the most difficult of the new regulations to comply with, and 6 months may not have been enough time to enable this change, switching on CLI and limiting the abandoned call rate to 3% of live calls would not have required a change to systems. I expect there'll be some tough questions asked as to how that was allowed to pass.

Secondly, Ofcom have clearly been riled by this case. I've spoken to people in Ofcom who have priavely expressed extreme irritation that within days of first investingating a complaint, the contact centres appear to be able to make themselves compliant - showing that there really had been no reason for them not to comply. This frustration has come out in pubic in this case. For a regulator to use language like "Had we not been limited by the statutory maximum, we would have imposed a larger financial penalty to reflect this misuse" in a press release is pretty strong stuff.

Ed Richards, Ofcom's new Chief, has clearly got the bit between his teeth on this matter. Good news for consumer, great news for call centres who take good practice and their committment to responsible dialling seriousy. Bad news for the bad guys. Here endeth the lesson.