How these figures are produced
Every number on this site traces to a published document. This page explains exactly where each one comes from, and — as importantly — what it does not mean.
Where the decisions come from
The Financial Ombudsman Service publishes every final decision an ombudsman issues. We read the published record for the “Banking, credit and mortgages” sector and store the full text of each decision.
Which decisions are counted
The Ombudsman decides complaints across six sectors. Every headline figure on this site — uphold rates, issue rates, the scorecard, the odds tool — covers banking, credit and mortgages only.
That is deliberate. Firms sit very differently across the sectors (some large banks are over 40% non-banking by decision count) and the sectors behave differently: banking upholds at about 30%, PPI 28%, insurance 39%, investments 44%. Averaging them would produce a headline whose meaning changed with a firm’s product mix. The other sectors are kept and shown as a separate, labelled breakdown on each firm’s page.
Where the outcome comes from
The Ombudsman’s own search exposes the outcome as a filter, so a decision’s outcome is recorded from the Ombudsman’s classification, not inferred from its prose. We also parse the operative sentence independently as a cross-check; where the two disagree, the decision is flagged rather than silently resolved.
Partial upholds are the one case the Ombudsman’s binary filter cannot express, so those are identified from the decision text and counted separately.
What an uphold rate here is — and is not
It is not the same as a firm’s complaint uphold rate. Published final decisions are cases that went all the way to an ombudsman. The overwhelming majority of complaints are resolved long before that, by the firm or by an investigator. A firm’s rate here therefore describes its contested cases, not its complaints overall.
Where a firm reports figures to the FCA or the Ombudsman under its statutory returns, we show those alongside, clearly labelled, so the two measures can be compared rather than confused.
Thresholds
No uphold rate is published for a firm with fewer than 30 decisions carrying a recorded outcome, and none for an issue with fewer than 20. A percentage over a handful of cases is noise, and presenting it as a finding would be misleading.
Attribution
A decision counts toward a firm only where the text names that firm unambiguously. Where a name could refer to more than one company, the decision is left unattributed rather than guessed. Firm counts are therefore a floor, not a total — we would rather undercount than publish a wrong statement about a named company.
Quotes
Quoted wording is shown only where the exact text was verified to appear in the decision it is attributed to. Anything that fails that check is not shown.
What this site is not
It reports what was decided. It does not predict what will be decided in any other case, and nothing here is legal advice. If you are complaining about a financial firm, the Financial Ombudsman Service is free to use and you do not need anyone’s help to approach it.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong, we want to fix it. Every published decision has a page here carrying its reference and a link to the Ombudsman’s own document, so any number can be checked against the source. Decisions we could not attribute to a named firm with certainty are counted but not published, so a firm’s total is a floor.