26,268 published ombudsman decisions landed in 2023. 41.5% of those decisions were upheld, while 58.5% were not upheld. That makes 2023 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 8,694 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 2023.

Banking and Payments alone contributed 33.1% of all decisions published in 2023, which makes it the clearest lens for understanding how complaint pressure expressed itself that year.

Barclays Bank UK PLC, HSBC UK Bank Plc, Santander UK Plc, and others were the most visible firms in the published decisions for 2023. 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.