Total number of financial complaints continues to fall – FCA

The City watchdog said the total number of complaints was 2.05 million.

Payment protection insurance (PPI) is still the most complained about product, with the total number of PPI complaints more or less unchanged at 0.93 million. Without PPI, the number of complaints was 1.12 million.

Complaints about current accounts have seen the largest reduction – 46,000 or 10% - in this period.

Christopher Woolard, director of strategy and competition, said: “To see another six months of reduction in the total number complaints is encouraging.

“Firms still need to continue to ensure they are doing all they can to reduce consumer dissatisfaction, but the figures show firms are taking our feedback seriously”.

The total redress paid to consumers was £1.96 billion which is less than 1 per cent lower than the redress paid between July and December 2015.

The top five most complained about firms between January and June 2016 (excluding consumer credit) were:

The FCA publishes complaints data received from firms every six months, alongside aggregated figures covering the whole industry. The FCA requires firms which receive 500 or more complaints in a six-month period to publish the information on their websites.

The FCA’s downloadable table provides a link to each firm’s website where you can find this information.

The FCA will be providing more contextualisation information in future publications and will be requiring firms to publish this on their own websites (rather than doing so on a recommended basis) from February next year.

By product group, the firms with the largest number of complaints opened in the first half of 2016 were:

Banking and credit cards

Home finance (mortgages and equity release products)

General insurance and pure protection (including payment protection insurance)

Decumulation, Life and Pensions

Investments