26,747 published ombudsman decisions landed in 2019. 30.4% of those decisions were upheld, while 69.6% were not upheld. That makes 2019 a meaningful benchmark year for understanding where complaint pressure and adjudication risk sat across the corpus.

Banking and credit was the heaviest product area, accounting for 10,429 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 Banking and credit, Payment protection insurance (PPI), Insurance (excluding PPI), and others, which together represented the centre of complaint activity in the published decisions for 2019.

Banking and credit alone contributed 39.0% of all decisions published in 2019, which makes it the clearest lens for understanding how complaint pressure expressed itself that year.

Bank of Scotland Plc, Lloyds Bank PLC, Barclays Bank UK PLC, and others were the most visible firms in the published decisions for 2019. 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, non-disclosure or misrepresentation, 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.