Complaints we can’t help with

We can look at complaints about specific businesses and activities. Before we look at a complaint, we will need to check the details of the financial business you want to complain about.  We can usually help with complaints about most financial services firms authorised by the FCA, this includes payment service providers, and e-money issuers. Some financial businesses volunteer to be covered by us.

Sometimes we can’t help because your complaint should be dealt with a different organisation. We publish a list that provides links to other complaint-handling organisations, and we outline the areas they cover. Where we can, we'll try to help signpost you to the organisation to help with your complaint.

There are time limits that affect whether we can look into a complaint. And you need to have complained to the financial business first, and given them some time to put things right, before we can step in.

Read more about how long you have to complain to a financial business and to us, and how long it should take for a business to reply, in our guidance on time limits for complaints.

Generally, we can look at most complaints about businesses that provides financial services in or from the UK. 

For complaints about businesses based outside the UK, you may be able to get help from an equivalent complaints-handling body.

We have some information on our website about other organisations who may be able to help with complaints about a financial business outside the UK. 

There may be some circumstances or situations where we won't look into a complaint, because it isn't appropriate for us to do so. For example, this might be where the subject matter of the complaint would be better dealt with by a court, or where court action is already ongoing.

We publish some sample case studies that give further examples. We won’t usually look at a complaint we have already considered.

We have published some information on our website that give further examples of when this might apply. 

Before investigating a complaint, we first need to decide whether or not we have the power to do so (whether it is within our rules and jurisdiction to do so).

Official rules set out the full detail of who we can and can’t help and provide more detail about the reasons we might not be able to help that are mentioned on this page. We provide more detail on our site about what to expect when you bring a complaint to our service.

We can help a range of people with their complaints about financial products or services. In some cases, we might not be able to help if you’re not eligible to bring a complaint to our service, for example complaints from large businesses. 

We also provide more detail about our powers and how we make decisions when you bring a complaint to our service