Ombudsman Reveals Worst Credit Card Providers

BARCLAYS is top of a list of five high street banks most likely to wrongly reject their customers’ complaints against them, according to new figures from the Financial Ombudsman Service.

Of the big credit card providers, Egg and Capital One fared poorly with a high percentage of complaints about both resolved by the ombudsman in favour of the consumer.

The ombudsman’s third set of six-monthly complaints figures include the number of customers who took their grievances against banks to the ombudsman.

More interestingly, they also show how many of those cases were resolved in the consumer’s favour.

The most complaints went to just five high street banks: Barclays, Lloyds TSB, Bank of Scotland, HSBC and Santander.

They received more than 3,000 individual complaints against them and together they accounted for more than half of all the complaints.

However, this is hardly surprising considering that they’re some of UK’s largest banks.

As the Bankers Association points out; "The more customers a bank has, the more complaints it is statistically likely to get. And it does not necessarily follow that when customers complain the bank has been at fault. Most customers are satisfied with their bank and their account."

The worst of the big five

So, regardless of how many complaints were made, the percentage of complaints that the ombudsman decided to uphold in the consumer’s favour is the telling indicator of how well the banks are dealing with complaints since, ideally, the bank should recognise where they’re in the wrong immediately.

On that basis, Barclays fared the worst of the big five.

Lloyds TSB Bank received most complaints at 12,750, with Barclays coming second with 7,991.

However, the ombudsman found in favour of the consumer for 61% of the Barclay’s complaints, compared to 45% of the complaints against Lloyds.

These are both above the industry average uphold rate of 44%

Meanwhile, there were 6,211 complaints against the Bank of Scotland, with an uphold rate of 23%.

Santander had 4,881 complaints but the ombudsman upheld only 19%, demonstrating the best complaints-handling out of the five. HSBC was complained against 3,286 times, of which 34% were upheld.

The ombudsman’s chief executive and chief ombudsman, Natalie Ceeney said: "There is still more that some businesses need to do to ensure that complaints are properly investigated and fairly resolved."

Credit card complaints

Within the figures released this week, it’s hard to know how the complaints break down and are relevant for specific financial products.

The Financial Ombudsman Service collects data on how the complaints break down into banking and credit, mortgages and home finance and three other categories but there aren’t any figures which specifically cover credit card users with the larger banks.

A spokesman for Consumer Focus, a consumer rights organisation, said, "There needs to be more clarity about what is going on in the individual cases, and where products or institutions are persistently falling down in order to start addressing the problems."

However, looking at the figures for some credit card providers is illuminating.

Egg had a massive 72% of FOS complaints against it resolved in favour of the consumer and for Capital One the figure was 64%.

MBNA saw 58% of their complaints upheld for the consumer.