FOS fumbles with Covid-era case spike

Though payment protection insurance complaints are finally ebbing, the Financial Ombudsman Service is grappling with a case backlog, a productivity fall during the pandemic, along with a surge in cases – particularly in relation to current accounts and credit cards. Staff are reportedly being offered ‘voluntary overtime’ just months after FOS made 200 redundancies in its mass claims teams. [1] Adam Samuel scrutinises the Service’s performance.

Adam SamuelBA LLM DipPFS MCISI FCIArb Certs CII (MP&ER) Barrister and Attorney may be contacted atadamsamuel@aol.com.For links to where you can buy the second edition of ‘Consumer Financial Services Complaints and Compensation’, see www.adamsamuel.com/book.

The Financial Ombudsman Service has had a really tough pandemic. It hoped that with the August 2019 deadline for filing payment protection misselling complaints, it could start to become the dispute resolution body Parliament created it to be in 2001.