Xinhua, London :
Complaints on financial firms in Britain hit a new high last year, with more than 1,000 complaints received each day, showed new figures Tuesday.
According to figures released by the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), the ombudsman took on a record 575,836 new cases in total in 2013, an increase of 38 percent year on year.
However, the number of complaints filed to the FOS dropped in the second half of 2013 to 248,801, down nearly 25 percent over the same period of the previous year.
Complaints about mis-sold of payment protection insurance (PPI) products still took the lion’s share to account for 76 percent of the total in the second half of 2013, reaching 190,356 cases.
The FOS said 56 percent of the complaints about PPI were upheld.
Complaints on financial products other than PPI lodged to the ombudsman fell 8 percent to 55,747 in the second half of last year compared with the first half.
Of this, banking complaints reduced by 11 percent and insurance cases by 7 percent.
The FOS said the average uphold rate, where the ombudsman found in the consumer’s favor, stood at 51 percent in the second half of last year.
Tony Boorman, chief ombudsman, said: “The extraordinary volumes of financial complaints we saw in 2013 now looks as if they’re starting to level off at last – and that has to be welcome news for everyone.
“But we’re still a long way from being able to say that PPI is sorted once and for all.”
He said that over 1,000 people every day are still asking us to sort out PPI problems that they’ve not been able to resolve directly with their bank.
Figures showed that the top five most complained-about companies were Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, RBS, HSBC and the credit card firm MBNA in the second half of last year.
The FOS, founded in 2001, is an independent public body to help settle individual disputes between consumers and businesses providing financial services.
