OFT licence requirements

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is one of a number of bodies that regulates MBNA. The OFT regulates the provision of consumer credit, including credit cards, in the UK and is the organisation that grants us a licence to do business.

As a result of ongoing dialogue with the OFT, we have agreed to deliver greater transparency in some of the communications we have with our customers in financial difficulties.

We have worked with the OFT over the last few months and agreed a form of requirements that we feel will benefit our customers. These will be placed on our license as a form of requirement. The OFT licence requirements, which take effect on January 1st 2011, relate to two areas of our collections practices. They require us to:

1. make it clearer in letters sent to customers in financial difficulty that we will accept the repayment amount customers have demonstrated they can afford to pay, and;

2. maintain our policy of only contacting customers who have appointed a representative to act on their behalf if the customer or the representative has given permission or confirmed they no longer act for the customer; or the expected payment has not been made and we have made reasonable efforts to contact the representative without success

We believe these changes are enhancements to our existing strong practices.