Bank Complaints: Official Bad Guys

Bank Complaints: Official Bad Guys

According to the Financial Ombudsman Service 90% of all complaints against financial services companies are against just 142 businesses in the UK.

The total number of complaints last year was 2,903,000 and this excluded more than 1.2m “bank charges” complaints as the ombudsman has allowed them to not be reported as there are test court cases in progress on high bank charges.

In short, there are over 4m complaints of which 90% of them were against leading banks, building societies and insurers.

Given that the majority of the investments market is controlled by the IFA, independent financial advice sector, less than 5% of complaints were believed to directed at IFAs.

The UK biggest complaint culprits are the UK's largest five banking firms are Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, Abbey and HSBC.  

Each of the larger Banks had in excess of 3,000 complaints submitted to the ombudsman, but Lloyds Group and Barclays had around 8,000 each.  

Remember, these are complaints that have not been satisfied and have been referred to the ombudsman.  We suggest you think of a number and double it for the numbers of official complaints made to each bank that were settled or not taken to the ombudsman (and this excludes 'bank charges complaints' figures).

We suppose it stands to reason the bigger you are and the more clients you have, the greater the complaints, but we have to say the standards of some of the advice that we see from clients who have been to a bank before talking to us are sometimes shocking.

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