Year analysis

2014 complaint and ombudsman analysis

Detailed public analysis of the 2014 published Financial Ombudsman decision set, including complaint volume, outcome mix, product concentration, firm exposure, and recurring complaint themes.

Page summary

37,155 published FOS decisions in 2014, including upheld-rate context, top firms, top products, recurring complaint themes, and representative cases.

Published decisions

37,155

2014 decision volume in the public corpus

Upheld rate

23.1%

8,594 upheld decisions

Latest published decision 31 Dec 2014

Published decisions

37,155

2014 decision volume in the public corpus

Upheld rate

23.1%

8,594 upheld decisions

Leading product

Payment protection insurance (PPI)

45.7% of annual decisions

Leading firm

Bank of Scotland Plc

4,455 published decisions

What stood out in 2014

37,155 published ombudsman decisions landed in 2014. 23.1% of those decisions were upheld, while 76.9% were not upheld. That makes 2014 a meaningful benchmark year for understanding where complaint pressure and adjudication risk sat across the corpus.

Payment protection insurance (PPI) was the heaviest product area, accounting for 16,981 decisions. Bank of Scotland Plc appeared most often at firm level. The most frequently tagged complaint theme was delay in claim handling.

  • Payment protection insurance (PPI): 16,981 decisions
  • Bank of Scotland Plc: 4,455 decisions
  • Delay In Claim Handling: 3,824 tagged decisions
  • 2014 versus 2013: up 95.3% year on year

Product mix and concentration

The year was led by Payment protection insurance (PPI), Banking and credit, Insurance (excluding PPI), and others, which together represented the centre of complaint activity in the published decisions for 2014.

Payment protection insurance (PPI) alone contributed 45.7% of all decisions published in 2014, which makes it the clearest lens for understanding how complaint pressure expressed itself that year.

  • Payment protection insurance (PPI): 16,981 decisions, 19.0% upheld
  • Banking and credit: 10,276 decisions, 20.2% upheld
  • Insurance (excluding PPI): 5,566 decisions, 35.3% upheld
  • Investment and pensions: 4,072 decisions, 31.1% upheld
  • Unspecified: 260 decisions, 25.4% upheld

Firm and complaint-theme signals

Bank of Scotland Plc, Barclays Bank Plc, Capital One (Europe) plc, and others were the most visible firms in the published decisions for 2014. That does not prove complaint prevalence in a consumer-market sense, but it does show which firms were most exposed in the final ombudsman decisions dataset.

Complaint-theme tagging pointed most strongly to delay in claim handling, affordability assessment failure, communication failure, and others. These themes are the most useful public proxy for “complaint type” in this corpus because the raw decisions are not stored with a dedicated complaint-type field.

  • Most frequent precedent signal: Consumer Credit Act 1974
  • Second precedent signal: Section 75 Cca
  • Primary complaint theme: Delay In Claim Handling

Representative cases

Recent published decisions in this slice

5 examples shown

DRN090023831 Dec 2014Not upheld

Yorkshire Building Society

No summary extracted for this decision.

View source decision
DRN160413331 Dec 2014Not upheld

Homeserve Membership Limited

No summary extracted for this decision.

View source decision
DRN225269731 Dec 2014Not upheld

Clydesdale Financial Services Limited

No summary extracted for this decision.

View source decision
DRN279478731 Dec 2014Not upheld

Standard Life Assurance Limited

No summary extracted for this decision.

View source decision
DRN359012431 Dec 2014Not upheld

Bradford & Bingley Plc

No summary extracted for this decision.

View source decision