UK’s FCA Sees Record Complaints In Latter Half Of 2016

U.K. consumers lodged 3.04 million complaints in the second half of 2016 concerning financial products. This according to figures published yesterday by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the U.K.’s financial watchdog.

In its figures, the FCA noted that total complaints were higher in the second half of 2016 compared to the first — when 2.05 million were recorded — in part because the organization changed its recording process.

Prior to the last half of 2016, organizations didn’t need to report complaints if they were resolved by the end of the following business day.

“Consumers want a simple way to complain that does not leave them out of pocket. And they want to be assured that their concerns will be dealt with fairly and quickly,” said FCA’s Executive Director of Strategy and Competition, Chris Woolard. “These data will provide us with improved intelligence on complaints, including new detailed data to show where the industry is potentially failing consumers at a product level.”

The product that received the most complaints by far was Payment Protection Insurance (PPI), with some 895,000 complaints, or 29 percent of the total. (To put that another way, PPI averaged just over 4,900 complaints on a daily basis for six months straight.)

Still, PPI complaints were down from over 927,000 in the first half of the year.

First runner-up for the highest number of complaints went to “current accounts,” which culled 514,000 customer complaints in the same period.

One segment that saw a significant rise from the first to the second half of 2016 were credit cards, which saw registered complaints up 6 percent to 313,000.

For the second half of 2016, the FCA’s figures indicated that the total redress paid to consumers in the period hit £1.9 billion ($2.4 billion), the majority of which — £1.6 billion ($2.1 billion) — were comprised of redress paid out to settle PPI claims.