On 17 April 2016 an amendment of the Competition and Consumer Protection Act will come into force. The primary objective of the new legislation is the increase of consumer protection on the financial services market. To this end the new regulation will prohibit the so-called misselling, i.e. offering consumers financial services which do not correspond to their needs or are offered in a way inadequate to the nature of a given service.

This phenomenon took a lot of different forms in recent years, such as insurance policies combined with deposits or life and endowment insurance policies concluded with insurance capital funds. According to the legislator such products were too complicated to be offered to ordinary consumers. To ensure greater protection for consumers it was decided that misselling should be included on the list of practices violating consumers’ collective interests. The statute of limitations with respect to those practices has also been prolonged from one to three years.

An entirely new means of protecting consumer rights is the introduction of a “mystery shopper” whose task will be to verify whether a given service violates consumers’ collective interests. For this purpose the President of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) will be able to take steps aimed at purchasing a service and record his conversation with the controlled entity. After finalising the verification process the “mystery shopper” should present the controlled entity with credentials authorising them to perform the verification process and submit an authorisation to perform the verification together with a court permission.

A quick reaction to practices posing a threat to consumers’ collective interests will be ensured by a temporary decision being taken by the President of the UOKiK in a situation when during proceedings it is substantiated that further application of a given practice could result in a serious and difficult to overcome threat to the consumers’ collective interests. Temporary decisions could be issued even before proceedings pertaining to practices violating consumers’ collective interests are finalised. Filing an appeal will not delay the execution of the decision.

In order to effectively eliminate prohibited contractual clauses (abusive clauses) from trade the amended act introduces significant changes to the procedure of monitoring standard contracts. New regulations will enable the President of the UOKiK to eliminate prohibited contractual clauses by issuing an administrative decision. An entrepreneur who uses abusive clauses will have to take into account that the President of the UOKiK may impose a penalty amounting to 10 per cent of the turnover achieved in the year preceding the year when the penalty is imposed.

An entrepreneur will be able to avoid a penalty if it agrees to take steps to cease using prohibited clauses, before the President of the UOKiK issues a relevant decision.