Financial Ombudsman Service publishes a Discussion Paper on its future funding model
14 June 2022
The Financial Ombudsman Service has today published a Discussion Paper on possible changes to its future funding model.
The Financial Ombudsman Service received over 270,000 new complaints about financial businesses in the 2019/20 financial year, new figures published today show.
PPI remained the most complained about product, with over 122,000 complaints about PPI received by the service, including a spike in complaints following the FCA’s August deadline for consumers to complain to businesses about PPI.
There were year-on-year increases in the number of complaints about instalment loans (10,880 complaints received in 2019/20), guarantor loans (1,043 complaints received in 2019/20) and point of sale loans (4,667 complaints received in 2019/20).
Overall in 2019/20 the Financial Ombudsman Service received fewer complaints than in the 2018/19 financial year. This was mainly due to a reduction in the number of complaints about PPI and short-term lending.
The headline figures from the 2019/20 annual data, published today (3 June), are as follows:
The Financial Ombudsman Service has today also published its future strategy, ‘Contributing to a fairer financial world’. The strategy, which will run to 2025, sets out three strategic priorities for the service:
The strategy document details a series of success measures against which progress will be judged.
Caroline Wayman, chief ombudsman and chief executive of the Financial Ombudsman Service, said:
“This year the Financial Ombudsman Service resolved well over a quarter of a million complaints. Each one of those involved a question of fairness, and someone whose life had been disrupted because of a financial dispute.
“The fundamentals of good customer service, and good complaint handling, are constant, and the majority of financial businesses know this. However, some businesses still need to put fairness first in how they handle customer complaints. A key part of our work in the future will be to proactively prevent complaints, to stop unfairness arising in the first place.
The unprecedented Covid-19 situation has already given rise to many new and complex questions of fairness when things go wrong in financial arrangements. If customers are unhappy with how a financial business has treated them, they can come to the Financial Ombudsman Service for free, and we will see if we can help.”
The annual complaints data analysis is available here.
‘Contributing to a fairer financial world’ is available here.
14 June 2022
The Financial Ombudsman Service has today published a Discussion Paper on possible changes to its future funding model.
8 June 2022
Following an extensive recruitment process that attracted a highly qualified and diverse range of applicants, the Financial Ombudsman Service have appointed Abby Thomas to the role of Chief Executive and Chief Ombudsman.
31 May 2022
Welcome to the latest edition of Ombudsman News. In this edition we share our strategic measures update which outlines our performance in 2021/22 and the results from our temporary outcome codes initiative. We also highlight our online resource about our approach to vehicle breakdown cover complaints.