How the Financial Ombudsman Service Works

What is the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS)?

The FOS is a free, independent service that resolves disputes between consumers and financial businesses. It covers banks, insurers, credit providers, investment firms, and other FCA-regulated businesses.

Who Can Complain?

You can complain to the FOS if:

The business is FCA-regulated

You have already complained to the business directly

Either you have received a final response or eight weeks have passed without resolution

You refer the complaint within six months of the final response

Specific eligibility extensions apply, including DISP 2.7.6R(5) which gives employees covered by employer group policies the right to complain in their own name, even though the employer is the policyholder.

What Can FOS Award?

Up to £455,000 for complaints referred from 1st April 2026 about acts or omissions on or after 1st April 2019. The previous-year figure was £445,000 for acts from 1st April 2019 referred between 1st April 2025 and 31st March 2026.

Up to £205,000 for complaints referred from 1st April 2026 about acts or omissions before 1st April 2019. The limits are uplifted annually in line with CPI inflation.

Compensation for distress and inconvenience (typically £100 to £500 for moderate cases, materially more for serious or vulnerable-customer cases).

Interest on financial losses, currently calculated against the published FOS interest guidance.

Directions to put things right (correct a credit file, restore an account, refund a fee, unwind a transaction).

The FOS Process

1. Eligibility Check

The FOS confirms your complaint falls within their jurisdiction and that you have given the business a chance to resolve it.

2. Investigation

An investigator (the FOS used to call them "adjudicators") reviews evidence from both sides and makes an initial assessment.

3. View

The investigator issues a view. Either party can accept or request an Ombudsman review.

4. Final Decision

If escalated, an Ombudsman issues a final decision. The decision binds the business if you accept it; you can reject and go to court instead, but you cannot do both on the same facts.

Tips for a Strong FOS Case

Be organised. Present facts chronologically with the evidence indexed and cross-referenced.

Reference regulation. Cite specific FCA Handbook rules (DISP, BCOBS, ICOBS, CONC) by reference rather than as general assertions.

Quantify losses. Be specific about financial impact. Itemised schedules of loss carry more weight than narrative descriptions.

Be reasonable. The FOS responds well to measured, factual complaints. Emotive language without supporting evidence rarely moves the investigator.

Know the rules. Reference DISP for procedure, PRIN 2A (Consumer Duty) for substantive fairness, and the sourcebook for your product type.

What this looks like in practice: a case from the EvenStance founder

The strongest evidence in a FOS complaint is often the bank's own documents.

I ran a Financial Ombudsman complaint on behalf of a vulnerable account holder under a Court of Protection order. I am the court-appointed deputy for the protected person's property and affairs. The deputyship order was granted on a specific date in early 2024. From that date onwards, I had legal authority to act for the protected person on financial matters.

The complaint concerned the bank's handling of the account during a period that included the date the deputyship was granted. The bank's substantive response, when it came, was a Final Response Letter issued under DISP 1.6.2R. The letter set out the bank's position on the underlying account dispute, declined the complaint, and gave the standard right to refer the matter to the FOS within six months.

The problem was the date on the letter. The Final Response was dated several weeks before the Court of Protection Order had been granted.

That is a chronological impossibility. The bank cannot lawfully have been responding to a complaint from me on a date before I had legal standing to make one. There are only three possible explanations.

The first is that the bank had not in fact received a complaint from me on that date, in which case the Final Response Letter is responding to a complaint that did not exist on the bank's record, which is an administrative failing of the most basic kind.

The second is that the dating of the letter is wrong: the bank produced the letter later but back-dated it, perhaps to make the FOS referral window expire sooner.

The third, and the most serious, is that the bank had been dealing directly with the protected person during a period when the protected person lacked the capacity to act for themselves. That would be a substantive breach of the FCA's Finalised Guidance FG21/1 on the fair treatment of vulnerable customers, and a breach of the Consumer Duty's foreseeable harm obligations.

The submission to the FOS named the three possible explanations and asked the investigator to determine which one applied. Each was worse for the bank than the original substantive complaint they had been trying to deflect. The bank settled before the Ombudsman issued a decision, on terms that resolved the underlying account dispute and acknowledged the chronological inconsistency.

The argument did not require any new evidence. The deputyship order was already on the bank's file (I had served it the day it was granted). The Final Response Letter was already in their records. The dates were sitting on documents the bank itself had produced. All the submission did was put them side by side and ask the FOS to address what they meant.

What that tells you

The general principle is dates matter. Banks and their complaint handlers process volumes of correspondence and produce letters under templated processes. Errors in dating, mismatches between internal note times and customer-facing letter times, gaps in the chronology where action should have been taken, all sit in the documents and rarely get audited internally. The FOS investigator looks for documentary inconsistency more attentively than for emotive argument; if the inconsistency is in the bank's own paperwork, it is the bank's problem to explain.

Two practical moves. First, check every date on every piece of correspondence the bank sends you, against the chronology of the underlying complaint and against any external legal events (a Court of Protection order, a probate grant, a separation order, a contract signature). If a date does not line up, that is evidence. Second, ask for the bank's contemporaneous internal notes via a Subject Access Request. The internal notes routinely contradict the formal correspondence on small but decisive points: who said what, when, and on what authority.

For complaints involving deputies, attorneys, or other authorised representatives, the limitation analysis is sharper still. The representative's authority is a hard date boundary. Anything the bank shows itself doing on the account before that date, in the protected person's name, has to survive the question of whether the protected person had capacity to authorise it. Many will not.

Timeline

The FOS's average case-handling time was reduced to just under three months by the end of 2023/24, with the service targeting 90 per cent of cases resolved within six months.

The exception is motor finance hire purchase, where some consumers have been waiting close to two and a half years for a response, which is why the FCA extended its temporary complaint handling rules for those agreements until 31st May 2026.

Banking, insurance, and consumer credit complaints outside motor finance typically resolve in three to twelve months from FOS referral, depending on complexity.

EvenStance Can Help

Frank's FOS flow generates a submission with the regulatory framework upfront, the chronology cross-referenced to the documents in the case file, and the specific Handbook citations the investigator expects to see. The platform tracks the eight-week DISP clock and the six-month referral window. For deputyship and attorney cases, the date-of-authority analysis is built into the cover letter generated for the FOS.