The power to settle financial complaints.
The power to settle financial complaints.
This resource is intended primarily for businesses, consumer advisers and other professionals who are comfortable with technical information – and want more in-depth analysis. It sets out the ombudsman's usual approach to the disputes we see involving the financial products and services that are complained about most.
In April 2013 we started the process of making the individual final decisions of our ombudsmen publicly available – as required by the new Financial Services Act 2012 and following earlier consultation and feedback. We published an update on our approach to this in March 2013.
The decisions will name the business but not the consumer – and they will be available in a searchable database on this page.
As part of the practical arrangements involved in publishing decisions, there will be a short delay between an ombudsman sending out their decision to the two parties in each case – and that decision being made available on our website. This is because we need to allow a short period for the two parties to respond, once they have received a decision. This means that after the process begins in April, decisions will start appearing on the website in early summer.
As we will not be publishing ombudsman decisions retrospectively, we also want to make sure that when the new database first goes live, it will hold enough decisions to show the full range of work we do.
our series of factsheets [in PDF format] giving a quick and informal overview of a range of technical issues: