Lloyds tops FOS complaints list

[CliveH]

This just in from one of the "pinks"

 

Leah Milner - 15-Sep-2009

 

Lloyds Banking Group has topped the list of financial firms against which the Financial Ombudsman Service received the highest level of complaints, with 15,233 across its brands between January and June this year.

 

Barclays was second on the list with 8,802, while Royal Bank of Scotland had the third highest complaint levels with 5,883 over the same period.

The Santander group had the fourth highest number of complaints with 4,318 across all its brands including Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and Santander Asset Management.

 

Meanwhile, HSBC saw 2,969 complaints across its brands and Aviva saw 1,229, Axa 929 and Pearl Group 815.

 

Sesame, the only IFA firm in the list, received 144 complaints and St James's Place Wealth Management received 61.

 

The FOS has also published data on uphold rates showing only 32 per cent of complaints against Sesame were upheld compared to an average of 59 per cent. Fifty nine per cent of complaints against St James’s Place advisers were upheld.

 

There was a 71 per cent uphold rate from the complaints received against Barclays while Lloyds subsidiary Black Horse had 95 per cent of its 1009 complaints upheld, the majority involving general insurance.

 

Lloyds TSB bank had 81 per cent of its 6947 complaints upheld while Egg had 88 per cent of its 912 complaints upheld.

 

Abbey National had 67 per cent of its 2493 complaints upheld while subsidiary Alliance and Leicester had 66 per cent of its 1786 complaints upheld.

 

Northern Rock had 78 per cent of its 593 complaints upheld while Tesco has 78 per cent of its 267 complaints upheld.

 

FOS chairman Sir Christopher Kelly says he will be writing to the firms with the highest complaint numbers to ask them to consider their performance very carefully in light of their competitors.

 

Chief ombudsman Walter Merricks, who will be stepping down next month, says: "I believe that putting this information into the open will now give those worse-performing businesses vital encouragement to improve – which should mean fewer of their customers having to bring unresolved complaints to the ombudsman."

 

Which? chief executive Peter Vicary-Smith, says: “Naming and shaming these companies is a victory for consumers but humiliating for the industry, who have had five years to get their houses in order.

........................

 

I agree 100% with Peter Vicary-Smith of the Consumers Association.

[handyman]

Would it not have been better to taking the complaints as a % of their total customer base, then compare this to another/different buisnesses with the same amount of customers. Would this not be a better indication of how bad they are?

[Guest peter]

I'm not surprised. I always viewed them as being one of the more greedy banks. We used to use them but changed years ago because of their penchant for charging extortionate fees for minor transgressions.

[CliveH]

Not really handyman as the survey simply looks at the quality of advice. If a company had a million customers but offerred excellent advice such that none complained then they would have a nice round zero number of complaints.

 

But if I with, say, 100 customers gave bad advive such that 10 complained then even tho I had a smaller number of customers then 10% complaints would ring alarm bells.

 

With the banks the FOS has already flaged up that my example above is the exact opposite of what they are finding in that the Banks represent the vast majority of complaints that the FOS has to deal with and a far higher number of complaints are upheld against the banks than average. From memory the banks represented 58% of all FOS complaints and about 40% were upheld.

 

In contrast IFA's represented only 3% of FOS complaints and of that 3% only 20% were upheld.

 

These fiqures published earlier this year were so damning that the FOS was asked to publish who where the worst offenders.

 

And that they have now done.

 

The most telling combination of facts is a) how many complaints were recieved and b) what percentage were upheld.

 

This is indicative of the quality of advice.

[handyman]

CliveH - 2009-09-15 4:53 PM

 

Not really handyman as the survey simply looks at the quality of advice. If a company had a million customers but offerred excellent advice such that none complained then they would have a nice round zero number of complaints.

 

But if I with, say, 100 customers gave bad advive such that 10 complained then even tho I had a smaller number of customers then 10% complaints would ring alarm bells.

 

Thats why i said its got to be compaired with similar sized companys. The company with 1 million customers would need 100,000 complaints to be the same as the small company in your example

[handyman]

And what if one brands got 50% of a market and the other 5 have 10% each.

 

Looks bad when one has 500 complaints and the other 5 have 100 compaints, but taken as a share of the market, they have the same % of complaints.