Five big banks account for half of total complaints

Five financial services companies account for more than half of the complaints submitted to the Financial Ombudsman Service in the last six months of 2010, new figures show.

The data published today on the ombudsman's website covers consumer complaints handled by the ombudsman service between 1 July and 31 December 2010.

During this six-month period, the ombudsman service received a total of 97,237 new complaints – an increase of 15% on the 84,212 cases received in the first half of 2010. Much of the recent increase in complaints relates to customers concerns about payment protection insurance products, the FOS revealed last month.

Five financial services groups had more than 6,000 complaints each referred to the ombudsman service, which together accounted for 54,078 cases – over half of all the new complaints received by the ombudsman during this six-month period.

The five most complained about financial services companies were Bank of Scotland, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds TSB and Santander.

Lloyds TSB topped the table with 12,234 complaints, of which 8,378 fell into the general insurance category- the vast bulk of which the FOS has said relate to PPI products.

In second place was Santander which was the subject of 6,759 complaints. It was followed closely by Bank of Scotland, HSBC and Barclays, which had 6,743, 6,731 and 6,535 complaints referred respectively. A total of 4,990 general insurance related complaints were referred against HSBC, more than two thirds of the bank’s total.

The FOS said earlier this month that the number of PPI related complaints continued to climb, accounting for half of the cases referred in the final quarter of 2010.

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