The Financial Ombudsman Service has apologised to St James’s Places after publishing a wrong complaints uphold rate for the firm this morning, claiming it was 22 per cent higher than it actually was.
FTAdviser understands that St James’s Place queried the figure that was included in the Fos' complaints data this morning (September 11) after it saw its uphold rate presented as 50 per cent rather than the correct figure of 28 per cent.
The mistake was due to a human error and has now been corrected, according to the Fos.
A spokesperson for the Fos said: “Unfortunately there was an error in the data initially published this morning, the uphold rate for St James’s Place Wealth Management should have shown as 28 per cent for the first six months of this calendar year (January-June 2019).
“We’d like to apologise for any confusion caused.”
The data showed that Sesame and St James’s Place again topped the list of most complained about adviser firms in the first six months of the year.
Sesame had 80 complaints referred to the service between January and June, while St James’s Place saw 75 complaints brought against the firm.
But St James’s Place took top spot in terms of how many of these complaints were upheld with 28 per cent, compared with Sesame's 14 per cent.
For St James's Place there was no improvement on the previous quarter as in the period from August to December 2018 the firm also had 28 per cent of its cases upheld.
Meanwhile, Sesame has seen a drop of 17 percentage points in the number of cases upheld against it.
The Fos figures also showed that adviser platform Cofunds has seen complaints against it drop significantly this year, from 182 in the second half last year to 113 in the first half of this year.
Cofunds had a 58 per cent uphold rate on its complaints, many of which are likely linked to its replatforming struggles last year.
Aegon completed its acquisition of Cofunds in January 2017 but replatforming issues followed shortly after, causing a raft of issues for advisers.
The problems included clients not receiving income payments on time and being unable to sign into the platform.
amy.austin@ft.com
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