27,326 published ombudsman decisions landed in 2022. 36.3% of those decisions were upheld, while 63.7% were not upheld. That makes 2022 a meaningful benchmark year for understanding where complaint pressure and adjudication risk sat across the corpus.

Banking and Payments was the heaviest product area, accounting for 8,600 decisions. Barclays Bank UK PLC appeared most often at firm level. The most frequently tagged complaint theme was fraud or scam concern.

The year was led by Banking and Payments, Insurance, Consumer Credit, and others, which together represented the centre of complaint activity in the published decisions for 2022.

Banking and Payments alone contributed 31.5% of all decisions published in 2022, which makes it the clearest lens for understanding how complaint pressure expressed itself that year.

Barclays Bank UK PLC, HSBC UK Bank Plc, Lloyds Bank PLC, and others were the most visible firms in the published decisions for 2022. 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 fraud or scam concern, 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.