33,811 published ombudsman decisions landed in 2018. 37.2% of those decisions were upheld, while 62.8% were not upheld. That makes 2018 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 15,511 decisions. Bank of Scotland Plc appeared most often at firm level. The most frequently tagged complaint theme was delay in claim handling.

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 2018.

Payment protection insurance (PPI) alone contributed 45.9% of all decisions published in 2018, which makes it the clearest lens for understanding how complaint pressure expressed itself that year.

Bank of Scotland Plc, Lloyds Bank PLC, Barclays Bank Plc, and others were the most visible firms in the published decisions for 2018. 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, fraud or scam concern, 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.