Financial ombudsman names and shames on complaints

by Gill Montia

Story link: Financial ombudsman names and shames on complaints

The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has for the first time published complaints data naming the banks, insurance companies and investment firms that feature in its statistics.

The figures cover the six months to the end of June and show the number of complaints received about individual businesses and the percentage of complaints upheld by the ombudsman in favour of consumers.

During the period, the FOS service received a total of 69,841 new complaints, of which 87% related to 142 financial businesses out of over 100,000 businesses covered by the service.

Across the 142 individual businesses the uphold rate varied substantially, between 11% and 95% and the FOS points out that the number of new complaints against each business is affected by the business size.

Therefore, the number of new complaints about each of these individual businesses ranged from 31 to 8,283.

Five banking groups each had more than 3,000 complaints, which together accounted for 38,286 cases or over half of all the new complaints received by the ombudsman.

FOS head, Sir Christopher Kelly, says he will be writing to the firms that generate the largest proportion of complaints to ask them to consider “very carefully” both their own complaints performance and the complaints performance of their competitors.

The data can be viewed at http://www.ombudsman-complaints-data.org.uk