Issues ›

Account closed or refused

Account closed, or an application refused, with inadequate notice or explanation.

Rules the ombudsman applied

Derived from the rules actually cited in these decisions, ranked by how often they appear — not from an editorial view of which rules matter.

Which firms lose on this

Firms with fewer than 20 decisions on this issue are excluded — the rate would not mean anything.

In the ombudsman’s words

Mr V complains that The Co-operative Bank Plc closed his account and only released to Mr V part of the credit balance remaining.

And PayPal has been unwilling to close the account

HSBC later closed the account and demanded full repayment of the overdraft.

RBS gave Mr B 60 days’ notice that they were going to close his current account

Quotes are shown only where the exact wording was verified against the decision text.

The US counterpart

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) runs a separate complaint database for American consumers. We map its issue labels onto this issue ourselves — the CFPB does not — and the two datasets are not comparable: UK figures above are ombudsman decisions with an adjudicated outcome, while these are complaints made to a US regulator, most of which are never adjudicated. A count of one is not a count of the other, so no rate, percentage or ratio is calculated between them.

The CFPB recorded 13,457 complaints mapped to this issue, received between July 2021 and October 2026, across all US consumer financial products.

Source: CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, not scoped to banking — the CFPB’s complaint categories span all consumer financial products, not just banking.