FOS charts progress against strategy

The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has provided feedback about the progress it has made in 2021/22 against the targets set in its Strategy 2020.  The FOS had set itself some ambitious targets in its strategy that would take it up to the year 2025, splitting that work into three pillars: enhancing its service; preventing complaints and unfairness arising; and building an organisation with the capabilities that it needs for the future.

The FOS said in the report on its strategic measures for 2021/22 that it had been another busy and challenging year in which it had made ‘real progress’ as well as highlighting areas where targets had not been achieved.  Members may access the report  here.

Some of the highlights from the report included:

Cutting its total stock of cases from 164,529 to 112,000.
Resolving 218,740 cases against a target of 220,000. The FOS had resolved 14,740 more cases than it had set out to, when taking into account the 16,000 Amigo cases that it was unable to progress.
Improving productivity by 12%.
Continuing the roll-out of technology improvements and putting IT contracts in place to transform its customer interface.

Under the ‘enhancing its service’ pillar of work, which is likely to be of most interest to members, the FOS said it had failed to meet its targets concerning:

The closure of all cases older than 18 months. The ombudsman had started the year with 47,551 cases which had been with it for 18 months or more. At the end of the year there were 9,081 cases older than 18 months; of which the FOS was unable to progress 8,918 of these cases due to issues outside its control, including ongoing judicial reviews. This left 163 of these oldest cases to close by end March 2021, against a target of zero.
There had been ‘significant progress’ made on reducing its unallocated backlog of cases – down from 90,000 in May 2021 to approximately 37,000 at the of end March 2022. Still, cold comfort for those firms caught in the backlog.
The ombudsman’s focus on the oldest cases also meant that the median time to resolve a case was 6.4 months, above the 4.2 target set, and consumer satisfaction scores had also decreased.

The FOS also published the results of a temporary outcomes code initiative launched in November 2021 which was designed to encourage businesses to proactively settle complaints more quickly by putting in place changes to the reporting of such cases. Under this temporary initiative, those complaints that were proactively settled by the firms were not recorded as ‘upheld’ for a limited period (1 November 2021 to 31 March 2022) and did not count towards the business’s uphold rate. This initiative involved more than 90 businesses (largely from the banking sector) and resulted in 6,877 offers being made to customers which secured up to £22 million in redress for customers. This included more than £10 million of redress in ‘authorised’ scam complaints, with more than 2,000 victims being refunded the money they had lost.

BIBA members’ compliance and regulation queries should be directed to: compliance@biba.org.uk quoting their membership number.

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