Financial Ombudsman Service

A landmark damages claim against Mastercard that could put £100s in the pockets of around 46 million UK consumers has been filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) this morning.

Complaints about Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Bank of Scotland and Barclays made up almost half the total number of complaints lodged with the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) in the first half of 2016.

A former financial services ombudsman is launching an unprecedented legal bid to secure £19 billion compensation from Mastercard over charges that were passed onto shoppers, claiming some 40 million UK consumers could each receive hundreds of pounds in damages.

Complaints about payday loans and packaged bank accounts have skyrocketed over the last year, but not by enough to knock PPI off its perch as the most complained about financial product.

People who accidentally send a mobile, online or phone banking payment to the wrong bank account will be given more help getting it back, under new safeguards brought in this week.

Hundreds of thousands of people who could have missed out on their wages after 275,000 payments were delayed following a HSBC technical glitch on what was the last payday of the month, and just hours before the long bank holiday weekend begins, should now have been paid the bank says.

Lloyds Bank is yet again the worst of the major banks and building societies for wrongly rejecting both payment protection insurance (PPI) and other banking complaints, new figures from the Financial Ombudsman Service show.

A major review to improve consumers' access to financial advice has been announced by the Government.

Complaints about Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) halved between 1 April 2014 and 31 March 2015 compared with the previous year, while gripes about packaged bank accounts and payday loans have risen, according to the Financial Ombudsman Service.