Issues ›
Complaint handling
How the firm handled the complaint itself, including delays and poor responses.
20,793banking decisions on this issue
35.8%upheld where an outcome is recorded
40firms with 20+ decisions here
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.
Consumer Credit Act 1974 · cited in 2,025
Consumer credit rights, including Section 75 joint liability for card purchases.
FCA DISP (Dispute Resolution) · cited in 872
How firms must handle complaints and how the Ombudsman decides them.
Payment Services Regulations 2017 · cited in 473
Governs how payment firms must handle authorised and unauthorised payments, including liability for unauthorised transactions.
FCA CONC (Consumer Credit sourcebook) · cited in 322
Conduct rules for consumer credit, including affordability and arrears handling.
CRM Code (APP scam reimbursement) · cited in 277
Voluntary code on reimbursing victims of authorised push payment scams, superseded for in-scope payments by the PSR requirement.
Equality Act 2010 · cited in 212
Duties toward customers with protected characteristics, including reasonable adjustments.
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
I agree that an award of compensation is warranted, and in all the circumstances, £200 is fair.
Mr M is unhappy with Arrow Global Limited (“Arrow”) as it didn’t send him a deferment application form (“DAF”) two months before the deferment date was due on his student loan account (“loans”). He’s also unhappy because it didn’t implement a previous Final Decision issued by an ombudsman at our service on time.
Mr G hasn’t been taken through, in a clear way, the movements on his account or received a meaningful explanation from the bank
and about the customer service that he’s received.
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 25,176 complaints mapped to this issue, received between May 2018 and October 2026, across all US consumer financial products.
Most common CFPB issue labels within this mapping:
Problem with a company's investigation into an existing problem — 19,400 complaints
Problem with a credit reporting company's investigation into an existing problem — 5,776 complaints
Source: CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, not scoped to banking — the CFPB’s complaint categories span all consumer financial products, not just banking.