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Big banks account for half of complaints
15 Sep 2009Five banks accounted for more than half of all the complaints the Financial Ombudsman Service received during the first half of the year, figures showed today.
Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays Group, The Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Abbey National and HSBC Group all received more than 3,000 complaints each during the six months to the end of June, accounting for a total of 38,286 cases, the ombudsman said.
The high level of complaints against banks is likely to have been driven by people complaining about controversial payment protection insurance, which is sold alongside credit agreements, and which accounts for around one in every four complaints made to the service.
The ombudsman has also previously reported receiving a high level of complaints about credit cards and current accounts.
Overall, the Financial Ombudsman Service, which handles disputes between consumers and financial services firms, received a total of 69,841 new complaints during the six months to the end of June.
Preferred Mortgages Ltd received the fewest at just 31, while Barclays Bank Plc had the most at 8,283.
Around 87% of complaints related to 142 financial services firms, out of a total of more than 100,000 businesses covered by the service.
The figures also showed that while the ombudsman upheld 59% of all complaints it dealt with in favour of consumers, the rate ranged from 11% for Zurich Advice Network Ltd to 95% for Black Horse Ltd.
Across the 142 firms which accounted for the bulk of the complaints, the ombudsman upheld 70% of complaints about general insurance products, 61% relating to banking and 41% about mortgages.
Today is the first time that the ombudsman has published details on how many complaints have been made against specific companies.
It is part of a move to increase transparency about the way individual firms handle complaints, while it is also hoped that the publication of the data will encourage the worst firms to improve their complaints handling procedures.
The number of complaints made against individual firms is likely to be affected by the amount of business they do.
But the ombudsman said the experts it had consulted had so far failed to agree on how this should be taken into account, so the size of individual firms is not taken into account in the figures.
Sir Christopher Kelly, chairman of the Financial Ombudsman Service, said: "The board of the Financial Ombudsman Service welcomes the publication of this detailed information, as part of our work to help financial businesses improve their complaints handling - and to reduce the number of unresolved disputes that have to be referred to the ombudsman service.
"I will now be writing to the chairmen of the financial businesses that generate the largest proportion of our complaints workload, to ask them to consider very carefully both their own complaints performance - as reflected in the data we are publishing today - and the complaints performance of their competitors."
Reader views (1)
A meaningless statistic.
Big banks account for (at least) half of all the financial accounts that exist, so is this saying that they are no worse than the rest, or what?
What would mean something is the complaints per customer for the "big banks" compared to the others. Or even more usefully, just per bank, because personal experience is that some big banks are superb and others are awful.
- Nigel, London, 15/09/2009 13:00
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