A Study On The Legal Concept Of "Financial Consumers"

With the deepening of the financial freedom, all kinds of financial products and services become more and more professional and complex, and they emerge in an endless stream. Within this background, the rights of plenty of consumers in the financial field are frequently violated."Protection the rights and interests of financial consumers" has become the hottest topic in the theory and practice. And the basic to explore the financial consumers’rights is to figure out its connotation and extension. Only clarify the concept first, can we solve the problem of the rights protection. But in China, the concept "financial consumer" has not yet become a certain legal concept. There are lots of dispute and conflict about it in theory. In this context, this article is aim to define the intention of the "financial consumer".Therefore, this paper is to conclude the concept and connotation of "financial consumer", and then combined with the specific field of financial services, initially defines extension of the "financial consumers". The methods of this paper including induction by comparison, historical analysis and empirical analysis. Expect the methods, this article also takes the "financial consumer" concept as the starting point, has a reference of the legislative experience in foreign countries and discusses the relations between "financial consumer" and "consumer".In the first part, we pose a question through a case:why should study the legal concept of "financial consumer". This part mainly includes three aspects. First,as the beginning of the article, it first analyses a typical case which has a great influence in the financial field, and then it concludes that the rights of the consumers are not effectively protected because we do not have legal documents to regulate the connotation of "financial consumer". Secondly, we describe the infringement that occurred frequently in the financial market through the surface phenomena of the case discussed above. At last, it puts forward the urgency to protect the legitimate rights and interests of financial consumers, and then it summarizes the necessity and urgency to define "financial consumer" in legal documents from practical level.In the second part, this article presents the legislation about the concept of "financial consumer". We mainly quote the definition about financial consumer in extraterritorial and domain. This part includes two aspects:one of them is the foreign legislation about the concept. It mainly introduces the legislative status and the basic connotation of "financial consumer"in some developed countries. Another aspect is the discussion about the mainstream view about the concept of "financial consumer" in China. We can see that the concept has not clearly established in law in our current legislation. But the necessity of existence of this concept is still recognized in circles of theory and practice even though scholars have great difference opinions about the connotation of this concept.In the third part, the article elaborates the necessity and feasibility of establishing the legal concept of "financial consumer". The first step, the author states the urgency to define the concept in law in theory. The second aspect is presented in two different ways in order to solve this problem. One is to establish special financial law and another is to bring the "financial consumer"into "consumer protection law". Through the comparison of the two methods, the author agree with the second solution, and point that establishing a special financial law is a future solution when the time is right.The last part is the most important part. This chapter is to explore the connotation and extension of "financial consumer". In last part,this article has been explicitly endorsed the appropriate about fitting financial consumers into "consumer". Then this part first proves that financial consumer belongs to the category of traditional consumer by demonstrating that "financial consumer" conforms to the fundamental attributes of consumers. Then the paper further defined the connotation of the "financial consumer" as a group of consumers. Finally, analyze and determine the denotative content of "financial consumer" through observation about the business in financial sector,for example the deals the bank customers, investors and insured put through.