Imagine calling your bank to dispute a charge you do not recognize. You spend several minutes explaining the issue, the agent understands the situation… and suddenly offers you a discounted home insurance policy. Beyond being poor practice, this is now a legal breach. Law 10/2025 expressly prohibits it, and financial institutions must review their processes, incentives, and team training to ensure it does not happen.
At first glance, this requirement may seem secondary within the regulation. However, its organisational implications are significant, especially in a sector where customer service teams have spent years being trained to maximise the commercial value of every customer interaction.
What the law prohibits
Article 29.3 of the amended Law 44/2002, in connection with Article 13 of the Customer Service Act (LSAC), establishes two obligations that financial institutions must implement before 28 December 2026:
• Organisational separation between Customer Service Departments and commercial teams. Both structures cannot share sales targets or sales incentives.
• An express prohibition on making commercial offers while handling a complaint or claim, without exceptions.
This prohibition is not arbitrary. It is directly linked to the risk of mis-selling — selling an unsuitable product by taking advantage of a customer’s vulnerable position — a practice that has been under the scrutiny of the Bank of Spain and the CNMV for years. The Customer Service Act now turns this into a legal obligation with clear sanctions.
Separation of teams or separation of functions?
One of the most common questions raised by financial institutions is whether the law requires physically separate teams for customer service and sales, or whether a functional separation is sufficient. Consulting C3’s interpretation, aligned with the position held by the AERC, is that the regulation requires functional separation, not necessarily structural separation.
In practice, this means that while an agent is managing a complaint or claim, they cannot perform any commercial action. Incentives, targets, and scripts must all be designed to exclude any commercial component during those interactions. If an agent’s compensation includes sales-related variables, institutions must ensure these do not apply or generate incentives during complaint handling.
This also impacts CRM systems: if, during a complaint call, the agent’s screen automatically suggests products that could be offered to the customer, this functionality must be disabled while the interaction is classified as a complaint.
What about customer retention?
This is where one of the most interesting discussions arises: if a customer calls to cancel a service, can the institution attempt to retain them? Is this considered a prohibited commercial action or a legitimate customer relationship management activity?
According to the AERC’s interpretation, the key distinction lies in the approach. What the law prohibits is a purely commercial action: making a financial offer to prevent the customer from leaving. What could still be allowed is informing the customer about alternatives that genuinely address the issue they are experiencing.
The difference is subtle but crucial. If a customer wants to close their account because fees are too high, offering them a discount would be considered a prohibited commercial action. However, if the customer is experiencing a technical issue with a digital service and, while resolving it, the agent informs them that there is an improved version without that issue, the context is different. The underlying principle should always be the same: are we solving the customer’s problem, or are we taking advantage of their vulnerability to sell them something?
The controls that the law requires
Having a written policy is not enough. The regulation requires specific and documented controls:
• Review and update of scripts and customer service protocols to remove any commercial call-to-action during complaint or claim handling.
• Systematic call monitoring to detect and document potential breaches, together with corrective action plans.
• Specific and documented training for Customer Service agents regarding this functional separation, with particular emphasis on ambiguous scenarios such as customer retention.
• Review of incentive models to ensure that no commercial component influences complaint management.
• Interaction records available for audit by the Bank of Spain, the CNMV, or the DGSFP at any time.
If the Customer Service model is properly designed, complying with this requirement is easier than it may seem. The real challenge appears when organisations have spent years combining functions that the law now requires to be clearly separated. The deadline is approaching quickly, and the risk of inaction goes beyond regulatory sanctions: an institution that sells during a complaint process not only breaches the law, but also damages customer trust in a way that is difficult to repair.