Popular high street lenders top mortgage complaint list

According to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), Bank of Scotland, Santander and Barclays got the most complaints about their mortgage services than any other lenders in the second half of last year. This is bad news for BOS and Santander who also topped the complaints list in H1 as well, a shocking result considering these are some of the most popular high street lenders when it comes to mortgage lending.

The FOS has come under fire for ‘naming and shaming’ companies when it comes to complaints, but they insist that it is a good method for enabling firms to benchmark their results against other firms, causing a form of competition and giving companies the chance to improve against their closest rivals. This will cause companies to not only improve for themselves - getting more business through having an improved service - but also for their customers, who will no doubt be saved a lot of trouble and stress.

The most complaints registered are about payment protection insurance - a situation which has continued to gripe with the general public and has gotten worse as time has gone on, with the total recorded number of complaints about PPI going from 19,259 in the third quarter of 2011 to 30,301 in the final quarter. Barclays had the most recorded PPI complaints, at 6,975.

Experts suggest that this information gives a strong example of how popular high street lenders are still failing to treat their customers well when things go wrong. With so many customers complaining about mis-sold insurance this is clearly something which must be addressed  by banks, who need to review how they go about selling PPI to customers, and ensuring that the customer is aware of what they are being sold and what it covers. A number of banks still need to look at their customer service and how best to deal with those undergoing significant financial struggles as now that they are being names as some of the most difficult banks to work with, this will heavily affect the amount of customers who approach them in the first place.

Rival bank Lloyds were happy with their result, which showed a 23% drop from the previous year and maintained that this has come from simply tightening up their rules on customer service and complaints, following the previous years figures.

Article by: Taj Kang, Associate Director at Contractor Mortgages Made Easy

Media Contact: Raman Kaur, Public Relations Manager.

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