The chief ombudsman at the Financial Ombudsman Service has said she is listening to the industry about a need to better handle the flood of complaints the body receives.
In the Fos's annual review of 2017/18 Caroline Wayman said the service was trying to adapt to a changing financial services sector at the same time as handling a huge influx of complaints relating to payment protection insurance.
She said: "For us – like for the financial services sector itself – standing still simply isn’t an option. That’s why, over the last couple of years, we’ve been through the biggest transformation of our service since we were set up.
"While continuing to manage the fallout of mis-sold payment protection insurance (PPI) – with complaints still reaching us in their hundreds of thousands, accounting for over half of all those we receive – we’ve been ensuring that we’re able to respond to the problems people are having today, and that we’re ready for the future too.
"The feedback we’re getting from the people who rely on us suggests we’re increasingly in step with what they need and expect. However, change hasn’t always been easy – and, as we look ahead, we know we’ve got to listen, learn and improve."
Ms Wayman highlighted that in April the Fos's non-executive board asked former Which? executive director Richard Lloyd to carry out an independent review of its work, which will be published in June.
The Fos has faced controversy during 2018, with the Lloyd review prompted by allegations made in the Channel 4 programme Dispatches that some decisions made by ombudsmen may have not been fair to consumers, which the Fos has strenuously denied.
Ms Wayman also had to defend the Fos to the Treasury Select Committee after poor feedback given by its staff in a recent survey.
The Fos annual review also included a breakdown of complaints by product, with most - 55 per cent - of the 400,658 complaints relating to PPI, sold mainly by the large high street banks.
There were 5,257 complaints about pensions - which was a small increase of 2 per cent - and included a 37 per cent increase in the number of complaints about self-invested personal pensions, with 2,051 in total.
There were 2,611 complaints about investment products, which was a 9 per cent fall and 8,917 complaints about mortgages, which was a 14 per cent fall.
damian.fantato@ft.com
