Then and now: 12 years of financial services complaint-handling

Looking back a dozen years to when he wrote the first edition of his now-revised book on ‘Consumer Financial Services Complaints and Compensation’, Adam Samuel finds that considerable divergences emerge between 2005 and 2017 – in the volume and subject of complaints, as well as who is doing the complaining. The Financial Ombudsman Service must cease being relegated to “a dumping ground for regulatory problems”, he urges.

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

Looking back to when I first wrote a book on complaint-handling is like considering a different age. Indeed, if modern documented history is about 3,500 years old, 12 years in complaint-handling – a subject that was really born in 1981 – is the equivalent of about 1,100 years. When one looks at how things were done, 2005 was really the Dark Ages.