The UK’s Financial Services Authority has begun publishing more detailed complaint information in an effort to improve transparency, the regulator said Thursday.

For the first time, the FSA is publishing aggregate figures showing how many complaints regulated firms have received and how they have dealt with them. The data includes: the volume of complaints firms have received, by product type and cause of the complaint; and, how firms have handled complaints, including the speed of complaints-handling and the proportion of complaints that have been upheld by firms.

Earlier this year, the FSA proposed to publish firm-level data. That proposal is currently out for consultation.

In the meantime, the FSA plans to publish aggregate data covering the first half of 2009 in October, and will then publish updates every six months after that. The data published today covers the period from 2006 to 2008 and indicates that the overall number of complaints has increased by 5.7% over this period. The speed of firms’ complaints handling and the proportion of complaints upheld by firms remained fairly stable over the period — at the end of 2008 — 10% of complaints took longer than eight weeks to resolve and 40% of complaints were decided in customers’ favour, it reported.

“Transparency is an important regulatory tool. Publishing this information will mean that consumers and firms can now see how many complaints the industry receives and how it deals with them,” said Dan Waters, director of retail policy and conduct risk at the FSA. “This is stage one of our drive to say more about how the industry handles complaints and builds on our recent proposals, currently out for consultation, about the publication of firm-specific data.”

“We expect firms to treat customers fairly by dealing with complaints promptly and efficiently,” he added. “We are focusing even more attention, particularly through intensive supervision, on ensuring that firms are dealing with complaints properly.”


IE