29,837 published ombudsman decisions landed in 2021. 31.9% of those decisions were upheld, while 68.1% were not upheld. That makes 2021 a meaningful benchmark year for understanding where complaint pressure and adjudication risk sat across the corpus.

Insurance was the heaviest product area, accounting for 10,419 decisions. AXA France IARD appeared most often at firm level. The most frequently tagged complaint theme was non-disclosure or misrepresentation.

The year was led by Insurance, Banking and Payments, Consumer Credit, and others, which together represented the centre of complaint activity in the published decisions for 2021.

Insurance alone contributed 34.9% of all decisions published in 2021, which makes it the clearest lens for understanding how complaint pressure expressed itself that year.

AXA France IARD, Bank of Scotland Plc, Barclays Bank UK PLC, and others were the most visible firms in the published decisions for 2021. 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 non-disclosure or misrepresentation, delay in claim handling, 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.