According to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), the dubious title of receiving the highest number of mortgage related complaints goes to the Bank of Scotland. An article on mortgaesolutions-online.com reported that the FOS has received more than 550 complaints about the Bank of Scotland just in the first half of this year. Naturally not all were upheld but around 40 per cent of them were.
Barclays was unfortunate enough to take second place with 371 complaints but with 55 percent upheld, followed by the Abbey with 299 complaints and 52 per cent upheld. Other banks named included that Nationwide (191 complaints – 28 percent upheld), Cheltenham & Gloucester (159 – 42%) and Northern Rock (108 – 31%).
Walter Merricks, chief ombudsman at FOS, said: “The complaints data we are publishing for the first time today will help people to see how the financial businesses that are responsible for nine tenths of the ombudsman’s workload deal with customer complaints.”
It is hoped that publishing this data will help to encourage mortgage lenders to look for ways to improve their services and this should subsequently result in fewer customers bringing unresolved complaints to the FOS, which can only be good news for those working in the mortgage industry.
