Browsing by Author "Demissie, Gemechis"

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    Financial Consumer Protection in the Ethiopian Banking Sector: Analysis of the Legal and Institutional Framework
    (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2020) Demissie, Gemechis; Abay, Solomon (PhD)
    The Banking sector is strategic and vital for economic development. The 1929 economic crisis evidenced how important it is and how the regulatory framework is needed to protect the sector and the overall economic sphere of society. The banking regulatory framework may generally be bifurcated into prudential and market conduct regulation. Prudential regulation was majorly used and implemented until the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Afterward, however, market conduct regulation got emphasizes and started to be implemented in the financial sector. Market conduct regulation is about protecting consumers and ensuring that they are treated fairly by financial institutions. Ethiopia has also recognized financial consumer protection under the national financial inclusion strategy in 2017. Before this year, however, there were fragmented and scattered provisions that were used for financial consumer protection in different legislations besides the general consumer protection laws. Recently, a new banking law has specifically alienated the subject matter to be regulated by the National Bank of Ethiopia. Following this mandate, the National Bank came up with a tailored financial consumer protection directive that applies only to financial service providers, including banks. This thesis, hence, particularly interests itself to evaluate the adequacy of the financial protection law of Ethiopia against the G20-High Level Principles on financial consumer protection and relevant countries’ experience. The thesis argues that Ethiopia has endeavored to craft a comprehensive legal framework as well as institutional arrangements. However, there are gaps such as the issue of juridical person coverage in financial consumer definition, external dispute resolution mandate of the National Bank, non-existence of standard for sales practices including tying of product as well as pyramid selling, incomprehensiveness of fraud monitoring and prohibition, non-existence of national document for education & awareness creation on the subject matter, under-resourced of institutional framework or unit, the gap in coordination and cooperation among stakeholders are inter-alia. Hence the thesis call for due consideration of incorporating these gaps and a better framework be deliberated.