A RECORD of more than three million complaints were made about financial products in the second half of last year, with Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) the subject of most of them, according to figures from the UK’s financial watchdog.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said 3.04 million complaints had been made to firms in the second half of the year, with a total of £1.9 billion in compensation being paid out in that time.
Of that total £1.6bn related to PPI claims, with 60 per cent of consumer complaints on the issue upheld. Complaints relating to current accounts totalled 514,000.
Many high street banks and lenders mis-sold PPI in the 1990s and 2000s and complaints about it are rising as the FCA’s 2019 cut-off date for them approaches.
Barclays, meanwhile, emerged as Britain’s most complained about bank, according to the FCA, with more than 438,000 complaints in the final six months of last year – more than 2300 per day.
It received 47 per cent more complaints than the next worst bank, Lloyds, and was responsible for 28 per cent of all complaints made.
Lloyds attracted more than 297,000 complaints, while Bank of Scotland (BoS), which is owned by Lloyds, recorded over 267,000 disgruntled customers.
The regulator said the figures were higher than in previous periods because of a change in the way it collected data.
Under new FCA rules, financial services firms have three days to resolve complaints less formally to a customer’s satisfaction, but all of them have to be reported. This is up from the previous limit of the next business day The FCA said the new data are more informative, showing numbers of complaints against the size of the business, and provide a greater insight about the products that consumers mostly complain about.
It said this information will provide a better understanding of the areas where consumers are struggling to gain satisfaction.
Christopher Woolard, the FCA’s executive director of strategy and competition, said: “Consumers want a simple way to complain that does not leave them out of pocket.
“And they want to be assured that their concerns will be dealt with fairly and quickly.
“These data will provide us with improved intelligence on complaints including new detailed data to show where industry is potentially failing consumers at product level.”
A spokesperson for Barclays said: “We’ve been working hard to get our banking complaints down and are no longer the most complained about banking group, but we know we still have more to do.”
Insurance was the most complained about in the FCA figures, and after PPI Barclays again topped the table with 160,650 complaints, followed by Lloyds and Bank of Scotland.
British Gas made an appearance in fourth place with 75,000 complaints about its insurance products.
Bank of Scotland topped the complaints league for mortgage lending, with a tally of nearly 22,000 and HSBC scooped second spot with 14,000 complaints.
More than half the complaints against Barclays – the maker of Britain’s first credit cards 50 years ago – related to banking and credit cards.
HSBC was the second worst in the banking and credit card arena, followed by Lloyds.
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