28,003 published ombudsman decisions landed in 2020. 32.3% of those decisions were upheld, while 67.7% were not upheld. That makes 2020 a meaningful benchmark year for understanding where complaint pressure and adjudication risk sat across the corpus.

Insurance was the heaviest product area, accounting for 7,311 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 Insurance, Banking and credit, Banking and Payments, and others, which together represented the centre of complaint activity in the published decisions for 2020.

Insurance alone contributed 26.1% of all decisions published in 2020, which makes it the clearest lens for understanding how complaint pressure expressed itself that year.

Bank of Scotland Plc, Barclays Bank UK PLC, Lloyds Bank PLC, and others were the most visible firms in the published decisions for 2020. 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, non-disclosure or misrepresentation, affordability assessment 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.