The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) received more than 270,000 new complaints about financial businesses in the 2019/20 financial year, according to new figures.
 
PPI remained the most complained about product with more than 122,000 complaints received by the service, which included a spike in complaints following the FCA’s August deadline for consumers to complain to businesses about PPI.
 
The FOS stated there were year-on-year increases in the number of complaints about instalment loans (10,880 complaints received in 2019/20 compared to 5,162 in 2018/19), guarantor loans (1,043 received in 2019/20 compared to 529 in 2018/19) and point of sale loans (4,667 in 2019/20 compared to 4,384 in 2018/19).
 
Overall in 2019/20, however, the FOS stated it had received fewer complaints than in the 2018/19 financial year – mainly due to a reduction in the number of complaints about PPI and short-term lending.
 
FOS chief ombudsman and chief executive, Caroline Wayman, commented: “This year, the FOS 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.”

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